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Queenstown, SOUTH AFRICA - Writers are generally egotistical and resentful of other writers who are more successful. No passion in the world, among writers, equals the desire to trash the taste and judgment of other writers. It is then with trepidation that I take up criticism of any book.
Mputhumi
NtabeniBook criticism is a wretched and invidious task only the boorish enjoy; always with [the] smug underlining of jealous resentment seeking an outlet.
John Cronwell has employed elegance with [the] unsparing candor of dubious historical perspective to construct a pastiche of collected opinions about John Paul II, and passed them off as a learned biography. He calls it The Pope in Winter. It is the first purported biography of the Pope that actually suggests Pope John Paull II has done more harm than good in his time of office.
This kind of writing is common and successful in our era; take the likes of Dan Brown's The Davinci Code, a poor crossbreed between Jostern Gaarder's Sophie's World and Uberto Eco's The Name of The Rose, with nauseating encyclopedic fatuity and all. What you get are, from the likes of Cromwell and Brown, hatchet jobs of near-to-the-truth confusion. Hence they ring true to the sensationalism of popular history and intellectual bon viveurs.
They're usually a charismatic and conspiratorial, sometimes elegant patchwork of tales from Western literature often alluding to and gleaned from old esoteric texts. Their writers are men of robust intellect but, if you're looking for genuine erudition you'll often be disappointed by the sketchiness of their works.
At least The Davinci Code has no pretensions to factual truths except the descriptions of buildings, as Dan Brown states in the preface. Cornwell's The Pope in Winter is supposed to be an informed biography, but does very little beyond ridiculing "the senile pope".
Take the fact that last year the pope forgot the location of the basilica of St. John Lateran. "The memory lapse was equivalent to the Queen asking where Windsor Castle is," says Cornwell. This might be factual but is a cheap shot. Most of Cornwell's biography of John Paul II is composed of such rubbish.
Cornwell uses and abuses such sensations, not only to suggest that the Pope has perhaps reached his due-by date but also to hang the case of his prosecution that the pope has done more harm than good. How do blank episodes, depression, and [the] geriatric confusion of a Pope who is suffering from Parkinson's Disease wipe [clean] the slate of a career that has spread over three decades? Cornwell does not really say. I'm all about sound criticism that's no respecter of any authority, but mudslapping is not a very good way of writing someone's biography.
Cornwell's book powerfully illustrates the current obsession with issues of personal character and sleaze rather than moral principles and real debate. There is little or no debate on matters of substance [in the book]. It reveals how, emptied of content, a biography can easily be reduced to a melodrama or emotional soap opera feeding frenziedly on gossip and titbits.
Anyone who has read Cornwell's exoneration of Pius XII [for alleged] Nazi sympathies, while entitling his book about him Hitler's Pope, would probably be less surprised by Cornwell's odd combination of a Cambridge don and sensationalist hack. His early pages of The Pope in Winter are sympathetic, but even then Cornwell cannot resist manipulating known facts.
According to Cornwell, John Paul II once told a crowd that, when he was a teenager, the Virgin Mary granted him "special interviews." The trace of this story can only be found in John Paul's most authoritative biographer, George Weigel, who insists: what the Pope told the crowd was that he and his fellow students had been granted "audiences" by Mary -- which actually means, in Catholic parlance, that she listened to their prayers. That is not the same thing as what Cornwell is saying, which is calculated to deliberately make the pope seem [an] egomaniac.
Cornwell's record of John Paul II's pontificate is often grotesquely biased. Another example of this is the manner by which he tries to take the shine off John Paul's contribution in collaborating with Reagan in resisting the spread of Communism. Cornwell tells us that in the office of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador there were files on dead children whose murderers were "trained by Reagan's compatriots". This is a grotesque and typical snide [remark] that can be taken for the general tone of Cornwell's book. Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed before Reagan came to office.
These unfair accusations, paradoxically, distract attention from the Pope's genuine failures; like the Church's cover-up of scandalous clerical pedophilia. Pope John Paul II must bear some responsibility for this, even if the actual abuse reached its peak decades before his time during the pontificate of Paul VI.
Cornwell blurs the distinction between the cover-up and the original crimes, like pinning much of the blame for the abuse on John Paul's high doctrine of the priesthood and centralising policies. He ludicrously overstates the extent of Vatican centralization throughout the book. If the Pope insists on appointing every bishop in his own mould, why are there so many bishops who are clearly non-apologetic for the Pope's doctrines? For instance in the English hierarchy the so-called liberals outnumber the Roman conservative traditional ones three to one.
Far from exposing "the dark face of John Paul II's papacy", The Pope in Winter reveals the degree to which Cornwell's prejudices have come to interfere with his judgment. This is a pity, because A Thief in the Night, his demolition of the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of John Paul I, was a model of impartiality. Something has gone wrong in the 15 years since it was published. Indeed The Pope in Winter is a record of intellectual decline, though perhaps not quite in the way its author envisaged.
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