THIS WORLD.(The Talk of the Town)(Pope John Paul II's foreign visits)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

It's been a long papacy, beginning, a quarter century ago, in a humility so genuine and tender, and so exotically not Italian, that Charlotte the saintly spider could have spun her "humble" over the white cap that Karol Wojtyla put on when he became Pope John Paul II. This pope was the voice of the fall of Communism and much of the moral courage behind it. He was the voice of reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and two millennia of excoriated Jews. But for years he's been ill, and today he is in every way incapacitated, beholden to his oldest obsessions, his harshest dicta, and his most reactionary keepers.

What most students of the papacy agree on is that John Paul II has been blindsided by his own life. It's a syndrome that journalists recognize as professional deformation: you'd leave East Germany, or, for that matter, Poland, so undone by the experience of the police state in its particular Stalinist insanity...

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