Tears inside and laughs outside

George Weigel recalls his time with John Paul II during the writing of his biography of the Pope, Witness to Hope

When I arrived at Castel Gandolfo in September 1996 to begin my work with Pope John Paul II on his biography, I had been in conversation with the Pope, in person and by correspondence, for four years. The discussion had been easy and free-wheeling, for John Paul, while a man of almost courtly manners, puts his guests at ease by his natural, unaffected friendliness. I was looking forward to a relaxed conversation about the Pope's early life; on this occasion, I was particularly interested in exploring the roles which his father and the bishop who ordained him, Adam Stefan Sapieha, had played in making Karol Wojtyla the man he is.

The Pope was a bit late. He had been taking a lengthy evening walk around the grounds, and came into the dining room dressed in what might best be described as "papal informal": a simple white cassock with no zuchetto, no French cuffs, no Roman collar. But this man of insatiable curiosity had a somewhat different idea of what we were supposed to be doing over dinner from mine. After grace before meals, he began, as he had in our previous table-talk, by peppering me with questions about the American scene, the Church in the United States, and the North American College in Rome where I was staying. Instinctively, he had turned the conversation toward the present and the future, rather than the past. Just as instinctively, this thorough listener wanted to hear what I had to say, not to tell me his own views.

That in itself said a lot about John Paul II, but it wasn't going to work in terms of my project. So after a few exchanges of this sort I said, somewhat sheepishly, "Holy Father, I'm supposed to be the one asking the questions here". One can imagine the reaction this might have provoked with, say, Pope Pius XI. This time, though, it produced an expressive shrug, then a smile and then we got down to work.

Over the next three years and 10 similar lengthy conversations, impressions of John Paul II the man began to form and then solidify. His sense of privacy is well developed; I told him once that I understood that, respected it, but would have to try to violate it, systematically. I also said that we were both adults, that I knew he understood my situation, and that I would do my best to understand his when he decided that any given topic should not be explored further. As it happened, though, it was John Paul who pushed me to dig deeper into certain subjects, particularly his friendships with the young university students and professionals he worked with in Cracow in the 1950s, some of whom remain among his closest friends today. Still, I finished my papal biography, Witness to Hope, convinced that there is a level of John Paul II's personality that is beyond verbal expression or analysis: his mystical conversation with the Lord, which is, quite literally, a conversation beyond words.

I also got to know and appreciate John Paul's sense of humour, which is robust and wry. He likes to kid, and he likes to be kidded.

At a dinner meeting in 1998 the Pope asked me how the work was going, expressed bilingual consternation at the number of pages of my first draft ("Due mille? Mein Gott!"), stared at me across his dining-room table and said, "You are getting grey". I said, "Yes, Holy Father, and most of the grey hairs are because of you." The Pope and I broke up in laughter.

John Paul is also adept at kidding himself. I saw him some months after his hip replacement surgery, which had not been altogether successful. It was clear that he was in some pain. I asked him how he was feeling and, without missing a beat, he shot back, "Neck down, not so good". Another visitor at about the same time, trying to express sympathy by noting that the hip problem would make John Paul's duties even more difficult, is said to have received the dry papal reply, "But I do not govern the Church with my feet". I can't vouch for the validity of this tale, but it strikes me as entirely in character.

Local bishops on their five-yearly ad limina visits to Rome can be surprised when the Pope's remarkable memory meets his penchant for kidding. One American bishop had put on weight since John Paul had last seen him. During his one-to-one meeting with the Pope, John Paul asked whether the bishop's diocese was growing. Yes, the bishop replied, the Catholic population was expanding, they were building new churches, the diocese was growing. "So is the bishop", John Paul replied to the now portly ordinary.

The Pope's personality is of course far deeper, richer and more interesting than such stories, however engaging, suggest. What makes a man cry can be as illuminating as what makes him laugh. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the Pope's long-time press spokesman, once asked John Paul, "Do you ever cry?" "Not outside", the Pope replied. There is little doubt that he cries inside, though. For what John Paul referred to in Crossing the Threshold of Hope as the "geography" of his prayer includes not only the great events of the day, but the hundreds of prayer-requests that come to him from all over the world, and which the household nuns type on to sheets that are placed inside the top of the prie-dieu in the Pope's private chapel. There, every morning, he brings the world's suffering before the Lord, in microcosm as well as on a global screen. We can be sure that there are abundant tears, "inside", during that time of prayer.

There are occasionally tears "outside", too. At the Pope's twentieth anniversary Mass on 18 October 1998, he reflected in his homily on the question that Christ had asked Peter, "Do you love me?" – a question both compelling and frightening because it means walking the way of the Cross. And so, John Paul continued, "I cannot fail to ask myself a few questions today. Have you observed all this? Are you a diligent and watchful teacher of faith in the Church? Have you sought to bring the great work of the Second Vatican Council closer to the people of today? Have you tried to satisfy the expectations of believers within the Church and that hunger for truth which is felt in the world outside the Church?"

There were very few present who were not moved by the sight of a man who had so self-evidently spent himself in service to others making a public examination of conscience. Then, after Mass, when some children from a Roman parish brought him gifts and he embraced each of them, the emotion overflowed: the children were crying, John Paul was shedding tears, and one would have been hard put to it to find a dry eye among the thousands in St Peter's Square.

At the United Nations in 1995, John Paul II defined himself as a "witness to hope" at the end of a century of tears. His hope is not optimism, for optimism is a matter of optics, and how things look can change. Hope, a virtue rooted in faith, is a much sturdier reality. And hope wedded to a rock-like faith does seem to be the defining personal quality of this man who has looked into the heart of just about every great twentieth-century darkness.

In 1969, at the height of the Church's post-conciliar crisis and some months after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring and any short-term hope of reform in communist Europe, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla wrote to his friend, the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, in words that strike me as utterly typical of the man: "I, too, do not lose hope that the great crisis that now shakes us so painfully will lead humanity to the royal way. Perhaps it will no longer be open to us, but we have firmly hoped, we will always hope, and we are and will be happy."

That is who Karol Wojtyla is: a happy man whose happiness and hope are on the far side of the Cross, the royal way which his Carmelite soul has followed for many, many years.p

• George Weigel is the author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II and is a Roman Catholic theologian and senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre

• This article first appeared in The Tablet and has been edited for reprinting in Village

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