102
PARTISAN REVIEW
in Rome), that lies at the center of the late Darcy O'Brien's recent biog–
raphy. The lengthy title of this work,
The Hidden Pope: The Untold
Story of a Lifelong Friendship That Is Changing the Relationship
between Catholics and Jews: The Personal Journey of John Paul II and
.!erzy Kluger,
somewhat melodramatically states its objective and also its
thesis that in the personal lies the key to the political. Not always con–
vincing and at times overstated, this is nonetheless a heartwarming book
that illuminates the personal experience of Karol Woytyla (nicknamed
Lolek through much of the story) as a boy, an adolescent, and then as a
young priest in postwar communist Poland. It is particularly good at
contextualizing and humanizing the evolution of his attitudes to Jews
and Judaism. The relations between Polish Catholics and Jews are
viewed through the warm filter of the interaction between two boys–
one Catholic and one Jewish-whose friendship somehow survived the
genocidal storm that devastated Poland in the middle of this century.
The Hidden Pope
does not ignore the historical forces that led to this
disaster, though the interested reader would be advised to look else–
where to understand them more adequately. But its real strength as a
book lies in its offering a case-study of how the experience of adversity
relates to the eternal truths of faith. We can see the roots of Karol
Woytyla's rapprochement with Jews and his atoning for Rome's historic
complicity in anti-Semitism paradoxically taking hold in the Poland of
the 1930S, a hotbed of ethnic and exclusivist nationalism. What is so
striking is just how free this particular Polish teenager from Wadowice
appears to have been from the anti-Semitic sentiments then raging in
Poland, especially in the heart of the Catholic church. As an example,
O'Brien quotes from the notorious
1936
speech of Cardinal Hlond, Pri–
mate of Poland, then advocating a boycott of Jewish businesses. The
Cardinal had claimed "that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic
Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness,
Bolshevism, subversion ... .It is a fact that Jews deceive, levy interest,
and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the
Jewish young people on Polish people is a negative one."
If
this was the
inflammatory tone of Poland's leading Catholic on the eve of the Shoah,
it takes little imagination to grasp the growing threat posed to Polish
Jews by anti-Semitic rowdyism at the street level.
Like his father, who was an upstanding, pious Polish Catholic and
former officer in the Austrian army, Karol Woytyla appears to have been
quite immune to this kind of Catholic nationalist rhetoric, which
branded Polish Jews as immoral, materialistic Christ-killers . O'Brien
recounts the following revealing episode which involved Ginka Beer, a
