[In the following review, Hebblethwaite examines John Paul's religious and political views in Crossing the Threshold of Hope.]

Librarians will have problems cataloguing this work. The author appears on the title-page as “His Holiness Pope John Paul II”. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to put it under Messori, Vittorio, ed. Then it would join the celebrated interviewer's other books like The Ratzinger Report—which had their fifteen minutes of fame.

Pope John Paul has been interviewed before. In 1984, André Frossard (author of God Exists, I've Met Him) published “Be Not Afraid!”: André Frossard in conversation with John Paul II. Frossard's is the better book for penetrating the Pope's Polish mind. He was allowed to probe away through supplementaries. Messori, though at one point claiming to be a gadfly, fails to buzz and is totally overawed by his subject.

This is partly because he has such an exalted view of the papacy that he makes the ordinary ultramontane look positively liberal: “The Pope is considered”, Messori announces with false confidence, “the man on earth who represents the Son of God, who ‘takes the place’ of the Second Person of the Omnipotent God of the Trinity.” That is why, he concludes, Catholics call the Pope “Vicar of Christ”, “Holy Father”, or “Your Holiness”. “You are either”, says Messori, addressing John Paul and evoking Blaise Pascal's wager, “…the mysterious living proof of the Creator of the universe or the central protagonist of a millennial illusion.” More bluntly put: You either prove the existence of God, or you are a fraud. Is he trying to make Protestants of us all?

Now John Paul responds to this hype with skilful dialectic. “Vicar of Christ” is indeed dangerous language, going to the very edge of blasphemy. But as Vatican II teaches, every bishop is the “Vicar of Christ” for his diocese. And “in a certain sense” every Christian is a “vicar of Christ”. Just imagine: Let me introduce my wife, a vicar of Christ. A new order: the VCs. But the point is: he remains the Vicar of Christ. So that shimmy doesn't quite work.

On the less significant titles, “Holy Father” and “Your Holiness”, John Paul quotes the powerful words of Jesus himself: “Call no one father on earth; you have but one father in heaven. Do not be called ‘Master’; you have but one Master, the Christ” (Matthew 23:9-10). That is one of the clearest statements of the New Testament, and an express command of the Lord. Yet, having reminded us of it, John Paul simply sweeps it aside: “These expressions, nevertheless, have evolved out of a long tradition, becoming part of common usage. One must not be afraid of these words either.” John Paul saves the day with the magnificent phrase of St Augustine: “Vobis sum episcopus, vobiscum christianus.” (“For you I am a bishop, with you I am a Christian”), adding that “christianus has far greater significance than episcopus, even if the subject is the bishop of Rome”.

John Paul does not speak of death, but admits to feeling old. So he reminisces. In his day, young people's idealism was expressed in the form of duty; today, it takes the form of criticism. Today, positivism prevails; in his day, “romantic traditions” still persisted. No native English-language speaker could ever say that.

John Paul tells the story of the brilliant engineer, Jerzy Ciecielski, who decided after much prayer that he should get married. What to do? Instead of going to the local disco or the parish ball, “he sought a companion for his life and sought her on his knees, in prayer”. That is the difference between the Polish “romantic traditions” in which John Paul II was brought up, and not only our Western societies but today's Poland too. But how hard he tries to bridge the gap. His message to youth is always: “What I am going to say to you is much less important than what you are going to say to me.”

He may really believe that. But no one about him does. Hence the Time-magazine epithets, “hard-nosed”, “hard-line”, “inflexible”. But he can't lower the bar or mitigate moral demands that are not his but the Church's. That is why, in Veritatis Splendor, the only form of holiness he knows is heroism. He has often quoted Georges Bernanos: “The Church doesn't need reformers; it need saints.”

Maybe so. But when, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he talks of martyrs as the true heroes of the faith, he lists only the victims of Communism, starting with the politically uncorrect “martyrs” of the Spanish Civil War. Yet nearly all the martyrs in his pontificate have been the victims of Latin American dictators who went to Mass every Sunday. But he simply cannot see that. It is his Polish blind spot. Like any Catholic, he starts out from a national culture which provides a strong sense of identity, and then tries to rise to the level of the universal Church. With his knowledge of languages, he has succeeded better than most of us in this enterprise.

But when he comes to talk of human rights, he has two paradigms unknown to the rest of the world. The Kraków Theological Faculty, he tells Messori, “condemned the violence perpetrated against the Baltic peoples” at the Council of Constance in 1414. They condemned, in other words, forced conversions. Later, he adds, the Spanish theologians of the Salamanca school condemned the forcible conversion of the native Americans on the same grounds. And so on to wartime Croatia, no doubt. But Poland scored a first Bravo.

You may never have heard of Father Kasamierz Klósak, a Kraków theologian of immense erudition. Neither had I, a student of such things. For John Paul, Klósak is a major figure, since in him “Marxist natural philosophy was challenged by an innovative approach that allowed for the discovery of the Logos—creative thought and order—in the world”. I must confess that I have not the faintest idea what this means.

What picture of John Paul the man emerges? He is like an elderly professor in carpet slippers, with a passionate interest in comparative linguistics. (I once heard him discussing whether Portuguese had a word for “nostalgia”.) He has thought deeply and prayed about every question that Messori can bowl at him. His reading is a little out of date—he introduces Albert Camus to illustrate a “bleak vision” of the world. But he has read Emmanuel Levinas.

This “conversation with every home” implies a very sophisticated household, expected to know the difference between the young and the mature Ludwig Wittgenstein. Such households may appreciate the truth that “man's existence is always coexistence”. But they will make heavy weather of John Paul's remark that “it is not possible to affirm that when something is trans-empirical, it ceases to be empirical”.

A question of more general interest is “Was God at work in the Fall of Communism?” After a ramble through God-at-work in the “new movements” and another vote of confidence in youth, he says that if people do not hear the voice of God in history, that is partly because they have blocked their ears and partly because they have been deafened by society, the mass media and the ideological foes who, since the eighteenth century, have led “the struggle against God”. That is another swipe at the Enlightenment. John Paul reduces it to an anti-God movement whose aim is “the systematic elimination of all that is Christian”. Marxism appears as a cut-price version of this scheme. Now Marxism has gone, “a similar plan is revealing itself in all its danger and, at the same time, in all its faultiness”. Moreover, there was some merit in Marxism. It began as “part of the history of protest in the face of injustice”, a genuinely justified workers' protest which was then, alas, turned into an ideology. Fortunately, this “protest” seeped into the life of the Church. It led to Rerum Novarum in 1891. Indeed, Leo XIII “in a certain sense predicted the fall of Communism, a fall which would cost humanity and Europe dearly, since the medicine could prove more dangerous than the disease itself”.

John Paul next exploits the Fátima story, claiming that the three children could not have invented the predictions that “Russia will convert”. They simply “did not know enough about history for that”. The attempt on John Paul II's life was “necessary”, which is another way of saying it was “providential”. It occurred in 1981, on the feast of Our Lady of Fátima, “so that all could become more transparent and comprehensible, so that the voice of God which speaks in human history through the ‘signs of the times’ could be more easily heard and understood”. This comes close to disclosing the “providential meaning” of his pontificate.

It would, however, be “simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism”. It crumbled under the weight of its own mistakes and abuses. The causes of its collapse were internal: “It fell by itself, because of its own inherent weaknesses.” He dealt more fully with this theme in his interview with Jas Gawronski in the Guardian and in his address to Latvian intellectuals in Riga in September 1993. In the preparation for the Euro-Synod, he acutely remarked that “now that Communism has gone, the Church has to be on the side of the poor, otherwise they will go undefended”. This upset those who regarded him as the sole victor in the duel with Marxism. You cannot please all men all the time. Or, as Messori says, in an “inclusive” translation of St Paul: “I have become all things to all, to save at least some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).