THE HISTORIC ROLE OF `ONE MAN IN A WHITE ROBE'

Author: By Paul Baumann

Date: SUNDAY, November 16, 1997

Page: L3

Section: Books

Jonathan Kwitny, a former Wall Street Journal and Public Broadcasting Service reporter, shares this admiration for John Paul II. If a million voices were raised in homage to the pope in France, there seem to be a million words declaiming his virtues in this volume. Karol Wojtyla, we are meant to understand, should be at the top of any list of this century's most admirable and historically influential figures. If that is not an original thesis, neither is it an implausible one. Much has been written extolling his role in the triumph of Poland's Solidarity movement and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Especially compelling was the deft way in which the Polish pope pressed the case for human rights and nationhood while discouraging any resort to violence.

Kwitny rightly places John Paul II's heroic commitment to nonviolent resistance alongside those of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. The story of the pope's shrewd dealings with Poland's communist leaders is told well. Kwitny is also a reliable guide to ecclesiastical intrigue and politics, to the pope's opaque philosophical writing, highly theoretical ideas about sex, profoundly Polish worldview, and deep mystical temperament. The swamp of Vatican finances, the pope's determination to suppress damaging truths about the Roman Catholic Church, and the man of the century's occasional show of steely temper are also examined. In short, a sound grasp both of John Paul II's greatness and of his fallibility is exhibited.

But like many talented reporters, Kwitny is no stylist. Nor has he knitted together this sprawling story -- taking us from Wojtyla's small-town youth to his present struggle with Parkinson's disease -- in a way that will hold a reader through nearly 700 pages. Too often reading ``Man of the Century'' threatens to drag on to the turn of the century.

This enthusiastic brief for the pope's geopolitical and moral significance is driven in part by the author's zeal to refute others. Special attention is devoted to ``His Holiness,'' last year's Wojtyla biography by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, and to its thesis that a wink-and-nod understanding (a so-called ``holy alliance'') existed whereby the Reagan administration funneled money and information to Solidarity in exchange for the pope's tacit endorsement of US foreign policy. Kwitny demolishes the idea of any such conspiracy.

Unfortunately, Kwitny's own interpretation of the Cold War is also quite tendentious. ``The facts suggest that the long war against totalitarian communism was finally won not by men in dark suits in command of violent armies, but by one man in a white robe with the willing following of an army committed to principle, and to nonviolence.''

``One man in a white robe'' is a flashy image, but as historical explanation it smacks of Hollywood. It is one thing to credit John Paul II with a large role -- perhaps the decisive role -- in the downfall of the Soviet Union. It is something else to cast him as a nonviolent Gary Cooper facing down the Kremlin alone at high noon. Indeed, Kwitny dismisses America's Cold War policies as ``a moral low road.'' Far from being committed to democratic principles, ``The US decided that to beat the enemy, it had to outplay him at his own game.'' Only John Paul II, it seems, emerges unsoiled from the 45-year struggle against communism.

Kwitny is right to remind us of US blunders, crimes, and hypocrisy. But after all we have learned about Soviet tyranny from the Eastern Europeans and the Russian people themselves, to propose such a crude moral equivalence between the United States and the former Soviet Union seems a willful blindness. Yes, the nuclear arms race was a kind of madness, and nonviolent political protest has an impressive religious pedigree and compelling moral logic. But the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance depends on the circumstances. The pope's eloquent pleas for peace in Bosnia, for example, were ignored. Solidarity succeeded because of the courage and vision of the pope and tens of thousands of others. But it had a chance to succeed because the United States, in facing down Stalin and his successors militarily, created conditions in which the pope's appeals to conscience could have their effect. To argue, as Kwitny does, that the Cold War was a wash and that the Soviet Union ``simply reached the rational conclusion'' to embrace capitalism and democracy is implausible.

On a related and equally polemical issue, a good deal of attention is paid to the pope's views on modern capitalism. Here Kwitny wants to refute a handful of Catholic neo-conservative intellectuals eager to enlist John Paul II in the promotion of American prosperity and economic liberty. Emphasizing the consistency of the pope's social ethics and quoting at length from his encyclicals, Kwitny shows how faithful John Paul II is to the church's traditional suspicion of bourgeois capitalism, to its century-long defense of workers' rights, and to the moral obligations of the wealthy. The effort to recruit this pope as a standard-bearer for a certain strain of Republican Party politics won't fly.

On the other hand, the potential significance of a change in tone in the pope's more recent writings about economics and social justice is not explored. More important, insufficient attention is given to the possible shortcomings of the church's teachings. Catholicism's high regard for social solidarity and economic equality remains entangled in a logic and philosophy about religious and moral authority that has yet to come fully to terms with liberal democracy. The dragon of Marxist materialism slain, Kwitny imagines the pope's next great adversary to be a corrupt and miserly Western consumerism. To be sure, John Paul II has much to teach America about morality in the marketplace. It is possible, however, that America has more to offer the pope than this author allows.