TRUMBULL—When George Weigel went to dinner at Pope John Paul II’s residence at the Vatican in 1995, it was an event that would change his life and lead to his writing two volumes, 1600 pages, about one of the towering Christian figures of the 20th century, a man who changed the Church and the world.
At the request of Fr. Joseph Marcello, Weigel visited St. Catherine of Siena Church to talk about his recent work, “Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II,” a third volume in what he calls a triptych about the life of John Paul II.
He shared stories and anecdotes about the saint culled from his decades-long friendship with him and discussed the “providential coincidences” that overshadowed them—God’s hand at work in their lives.
Weigel, who is the Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, said, “I never imagined writing this book.”
But then while he was traveling the world, discussing his second volume, “The End and the Beginning,” Weigel discovered that five years after the death of John Paul II, people did not want more analysis. “What they wanted,” he recalled, “were stories and anecdotes that would somehow bring him back to life….The risk of canonizing someone is that we lose the human texture, and I hope the stories in my book bring him a little closer.”
In March 1996, the Pope had said of his other biographers, “They try to understand me from the outside, but I can only be understood from the inside.”
They saw the public man who was the topic of countless news stories, analyses, opinion pieces and talks, but they did not grasp “the internal spiritual springs” of a man Weigel described as “a multilayered, multitextured personality, for whom everything began with a personal friendship with Jesus Christ.”
He was also a man who had an acute sense of Divine Providence in his life and who once observed, “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.”
One of the most emblematic examples of this belief was the assassination attempt on him on May 13, 1981, the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, when a professional assassin fired at point blank range and the bullet missed John Paul II’s abdominal aorta by a millimeter.
As Weigel said, one hand fired the shot and another guided the bullet, referring to the Blessed Mother.
Even the assassin, Ali Agca, was convinced “this goddess of Fatima” had saved the Pope’s life, and that she was coming through the walls of the prison “to do unpleasant things to him.”
“The pope’s reflection on the providential quality of his own life had a profound effect on me and my life,” Weigel said. Looking back, he could observe the same sense of providence from childhood, preparing him for his role as the Pope’s biographer, right from the third grade when Sister Mary Euphemia announced his class would be praying for the conversion of a communist dictator — Wladyslaw Gomulka. Thirty years later, when he was writing about Poland and Karol Wojtyla, the 40-year-old auxiliary bishop of Krakow, Gomulka played an insidious role in the story.
In college, Weigel had no intention of studying philosophy, yet doing so proved enormously helpful to him in understanding the thinking and mind of John Paul II. However, more important than philosophical ideas for the Pope was prayer. It was central to his life.
“Everything he accomplished in the world was the fruit of prayer,” Weigel said, and the most important part of his day was the hour from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., which he spent in the chapel at the papal apartment.
The inspiration for World Youth Day, which many in the Vatican thought would not succeed, came during prayer, and it ultimately became a signature moment in modern Catholic history. And prayer was central to the role he played in the collapse of communism.
One of the great lessons Weigel learned from his friendship with the pope was that “He refused to accept the tyranny of the possible — the notion that some things simply are the way they are and are impossible to change.”
With prayer and the Holy Spirit, all things are possible, even the seemingly impossible, such as the collapse of world Communism and a gathering of 2 million young people around the Pope for a day of celebration.
Even though we live in what Weigel calls “a seriously disordered era,” the life of St. John Paul II “provides us hope and teaches us that we should never accept that a situation, which ought to be different, can’t somehow be nudged toward change.”
“All of us are called to live counterculturally, which has not been the history for Catholics in the United States,” he said. “However, I don’t think we are called to withdraw and I don’t think John Paul II thought so.”
Fr. Marcello said St. John Paul II influenced him when he was discerning his priestly vocation in high school and college. “Aside from everything I had to read for my studies, I was always nourished by the writings of John Paul II. They had a wisdom and practicality and freshness that had a decisive influence on me.”
After his ordination, Fr. Marcello was in the Vatican during a ceremony at which the Pope was blessing monstrances that would hold the Blessed Sacrament and be used for Eucharistic adoration for priestly vocations in the Diocese.
“I had just been appointed assistant vocations director, and I was a few feet away from him, holding the monstrance,” he recalled. “I never met anyone with such piercing blue eyes. It was like staring into eternity.”
