[In the following review, Schroth discusses John Paul's theological views in Fruitful and Responsible Love and Sign of Contradiction.]

It is almost a plunge into nostalgia now, only nine months after the events themselves, to relive the three months of the three Popes; when the television camera peered benevolently down like the eye of God on the wooden box holding the discolored corpse of the sad, sensitive, loving but not well-loved Giovanni Montini; when Dan Rather struggled to pronounce Castel Gandolfo and announced that the funeral mass was coming to an end though it had barely begun; when all those never-before and never-since-heard-of papal “candidates” popped full-color onto the covers of Newsweek and Time; and when the Roman Catholic Church—briefly and imperfectly embodied in the 111 mostly elderly Cardinal electors of the Conclaves—paused, examined itself and picked two comparative strangers to be Vicars of Christ and, for many outside the church as well, moral leaders of the world.

It was the news story of the year, perhaps of the decade, one the news media were poorly prepared to cover because few journalists know theology or church history and because, in the standard man-bites-dog sense, religion is only occasionally “news.” Then, when a right-to-lifer firebombs an abortion clinic, an anti-arms race priest digs a grave on the White House lawn, a bishop marries or a Pope dies, reporters must scurry around in search of a clerical spokesman (most of them are bland and noncommittal) to explain what is going on. Moreover, a certain kind of clerical mind prefers secrecy, knows little about journalism and is, at best, amused by what journalists call the public's “right-to-know.” Thus, a papal election is to the religious journalist what a big fire is to a cub reporter—the challenge of his career, the chance, as I. F. Stone says, to have a “helluva good time,” if he doesn't “forget it's really burning.” …

The election of Karol Wojtyla to the papacy, said a commentator in The New Statesman last fall, had been expected in certain European intellectual circles for some time—an observation that may tell us something about the isolation of some intellectual circles from the general religious press now digging through his published philosophical and spiritual works for clues to the future of his church. Those who still see Humanae Vitae as a shadow threatening the future credibility of the papacy can take little comfort from Fruitful and Responsible Love. It consists of an address Cardinal Wojtyla gave to the June 1978 Milan International Congress on the birth-control encyclical sponsored by the International Center for the Study of Family Life, supplemented by a series of mostly fawning comments from authorities on the family. He emphasizes the importance of mutual love, the necessary connection between conjugal love and its fulfillment in parenthood, and the parents' responsibility to determine their family size with a free and upright conscience. But he jumps to the conclusion that “they will not have recourse to contraception, which is essentially opposed to love and parenthood,” without explaining why, for couples who already have children, every conjugal act need necessarily be open to conception. Indeed, his personalist framework and emphasis on love is the argument many Catholics have used to practice contraception with a clear conscience.

Much of what John Paul II has said in his address to the Latin American bishops at Puebla, Mexico, and in his first, highly personal encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, he had already said to Paul VI and the Roman Curia in a Lenten retreat he preached to them in 1976. As Mr. Hebblethwaite remarks, “he became known to the Curia and the Curia liked what it saw.” These spiritual exercises have now been published as Sign of Contradiction.

One of the paradoxes of John Paul II may well be that, as much as Catholic progressive intellectuals tend to appreciate a versatile and highly intelligent scholar-pope, they may have in Wojtyla a man almost too intelligent, a man—unlike John XXIII, who captivated the world by his openness and almost careless boldness—whose learning and convictions in a few crucial areas are so deep that he will find it hard to be educated by broader experience and what Father Greeley calls “the enormous leap from Cracow to Rome.” “Karol Wojtyla,” says Father Greeley, “is going to have to draw back from the attitudes, opinions, and perspectives of a lifetime to be fully effective in his new job.”

Sign of Contradiction reveals a mind filled with the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, yet unfamiliar or uncomfortable with recent scriptural scholarship; at home with Thomistic philosophy, yet always reinterpreting it in existentialist or phenomenologist terms; absolutely convinced that the false gods of “progress”—consumerism, the hunger for status symbols, technology—diminish man's dignity and his freedom to love. John Paul II warns us that Jesus never intended his opposition to secular and religious authorities to have political implications, but he sees in Jesus carrying his cross the Jewish prisoners in Nazi extermination camps forced to bear quarry stones on their backs and workers ground down by their machines.

Whatever he may be, the new Pope seems a man thoroughly at home with himself. In the long run it will not matter much whether we have a pope who skis, jogs, canoes, sings, strums a guitar, writes poems and plays, tosses babies in the air, or even one who smiles. What matters is how well be reads the various spirits of his own time and can tell which movements enrich and complement Christian humanism and which the church must contradict. “It is the task of the church,” he says, “to fight on the side of man, often against men themselves. Christ fought like that, and be goes on fighting through the ages in men's hearts and in the human conscience.” With Karol Wojtyla's leadership, it will be a fight to see.