Memory & Identity: Personal Reflections
by Pope John Paul II
Weidenfeld & Nicolson $201
To read these words from Pope John Paul must be of interest to many. To Catholics, because the pope is head of the Catholic Church. To Protestants and members of other churches seeking to follow the example of Jesus Christ, because of his Christian leadership. To non-Christians, because of the loyalty he owns among millions of people. And to others, irrespective of religion, at least because of his years of deep study and thought, privileged experience and world-wide influence.
The book is based on the main themes of conversations that took place in 1993 in Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer residence, at the suggestion of two Polish philosophers, Jozef Tischner and Krzysztof Michalski, founders of the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences. The conversations were recorded and transcribed. In this book, the pope's ideas retain their early conversational format. Each chapter is introduced by a question, posed by the unnamed editor of the book, with the pope's discussion presented as a reply. The final chapter describes, for the first time, the assassination attempt on the pontiff's life on May 13, 1981. It tells us how astonished the assassin was that his bullet did not do its work and his resulting groping after the thought that a higher power may have intervened.
Although written simply, the range of subjects is vast: politics and society as much as religion, church history and spirituality. The ideas are complex, considering and deriving from modern European history, theology and philosophy. The pope refers explicitly to the totalitarian regimes of national socialism and Marxist communism. Very striking is his assertion that the evil of the 20th century - 'an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work' - derived a philosophical basis from the thought of the European Enlightenment.