[In the following review, Pelikan discusses John Paul's theological views in “Be Not Afraid!”;]

When the Pope speaks ex cathedra (literally, from the throne)—“that is, in carrying out his office as the pastor and teacher of all Christians,” as the First Vatican Council explained this phrase in 1870—he is believed to be preserved from any error in matters of faith and morals. But whatever someone's personal or theological views about this ex cathedra infallibility may be, it is in many ways more interesting and certainly more unusual when a pope elects to speak in public extra cathedram, that is, in a personal capacity.

That is what the current Pontiff has done in “Be Not Afraid!,”; a book whose title comes from the words with which Karol Cardinal Wojtyla greeted the people of Rome after his election to the throne of Saint Peter in 1978. The book came out of a series of taped conversations with the French journalist André Frossard, an adult convert to the Roman Catholic faith. The conversations consisted of Mr. Frossard's questions and the Pope's answers. But as a skilled veteran of many kinds of interrogation from many quarters, Pope John Paul II managed to turn the questions in the direction of answers he wanted to give. As Mr. Frossard says, “the Pope is not averse to walking round a question before stepping into it.”

Mr. Frossard's questions ranged from the conventional and catechetical—“Should infants be baptized?”—through the more controversial—”Can one deduce a political policy from the Gospel?”—to the plaintive—“Has [the world] got one last chance of escaping the logic of death in which it is gradually being enmeshed?” The Pope's answers also covered a wide territory, from a totally official recitation of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 through an altogether personal comment on celibacy—“In this domain I have received more graces than battles to fight”—to observations on literature and philosophy—he likes to read Czeslaw Milosz and Rainer Maria Rilke and not only St. Thomas Aquinas but the phenomenologist Max Scheler.

No one will be surprised to find the Bishop of Rome declaring his allegiance to the continuity of the church, not merely the continuity of its institutions, moral teachings and theological doctrines but especially the continuity of its life of prayer and devotion. As the first Slavic pope, he is particularly devoted to Saints Cyril and Methodius, the ninth-century “apostles to the Slavs” whom he has designated as joint patron saints of Europe together with St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism. As the first Polish Pope, moreover, he has found ever greater depths in that nation's dedication to the Virgin Mary, whose depiction in the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Black Madonna, hangs over the altar of his private chapel in the Vatican. “Our inner relation to the Mother of God derives from our connection with the mystery of Christ,” he told Mr. Frossard, and added, “The more my inner life has been centered on the mystery of the Redemption, the more surrender to Mary … has seemed to me to be the best means of participating fruitfully and effectively in this reality.” Carrying out a moral implication of this reality—he sees the entire human race as a family whose mother is the Virgin Mary—he called his would-be assassin, Mehmed All Agca, “brother.” Mr. Frossard writes, “All round, I should have preferred this brother to find another means of entering the family.” But his fraternal embrace of his attacker was also part of the Pope's continuing emphasis on the imperatives of the Gospel.

But this Pope, like any true conservative, is open to change. Believing as he does in those things that cannot be changed, he is able to be flexible about everything else; he is acutely aware not only of continuity in the church but also of the need for and inevitability of change. “We must,” he says, “constantly seek a form of faith adapted to a world that is being continually renewed” and not seek to live in a “pre-Copernican” or “pre-Einsteinian” or “even pre-Kantian world.” Despite his admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas, his own exposure to non-Thomist ways of thinking has helped him take time and history far more seriously, than some Thomists have; he sees that “man is a being involved in history,” and thus he recognizes that “the Church writes her truth on the curving, muddled lines of history,” a truth that is immutable in its divine origins but is obviously mutable in its human expressions.

The human and historical relativity of the absolute truth implies that the church's position on various practical issues must repeatedly be reformulated in light of the continuing progress of insight and understanding in scholarship and science. The Pope notes that the church's consideration of “usury and interest in connection with the development of the economic sciences” has been changing since the Middle Ages. And he suggests its position must change today as it formulates a view of “responsible paternity [parenthood] in connection with the development of the bio-physiological sciences.” It is not clear what that somewhat cryptic comment may imply for a greater scientific (and theological) refinement in the interpretation of parenthood and sexuality than has been evident in the encyclicals of some of his predecessors in this century.

On the entire problem of unity with other believers, the Pope has concluded that historical honesty compels us to recognize the presence in ourselves and others of “a mentality marked by centuries of divisions and separations,” but honesty also requires us to acknowledge that “what unites us is stronger than what divides us.” To put it mildly, that is a recognition and acknowledgment that could not always be heard in the declaration of popes in their response to the Protestant Reformation during the 16th century, when it was still possible to do something about it.

Interspersed among these many examples of the Pope's wisdom are occasional—too rare, for my taste—flashes of his well-known wit. One object of the wit is Mr. Frossard himself, whom the Pope “accused … several times of presenting him in too favorable a light, of making him ‘the hero of a romance.’” Elsewhere the Pope put question marks into the margin of the manuscript and charged Mr. Frossard with being too much of a “papalist,” more of a papalist, presumably, than the Pope himself. Even a sympathetic reader will sometimes find Mr. Frossard's breathless attitude a bit excessive. The Pope's friendship may well be, as he declares, his most precious possession, and he may find “his presence at the head of the Church” the only remaining basis for any optimism about the world, but it is in keeping neither with the official spirit of Vatican II nor with the personal style of John Paul II for an interviewer to engage in the kind of Byzantine fawning that occasionally peeks through the pages of “Be Not Afraid!”;

Yet even Mr. Frossard's deference cannot detract from the intellectual force, personal dynamism and spiritual authenticity that characterize the Pope when he converses extra cathedram as least as much as when he speaks ex cathedra.