HIS HOLINESS: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time. [Import] [Hardcover]

Carl Bernstein & Marco Politi. (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition first Printing edition (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385405383
• ISBN-13: 978-0385405386
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,065,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars for the man, not the authors, August 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: His Holiness (Paperback)

While I enjoyed this book, I do feel that there is a vague sense of Catholic bashing going on. John Paul II is a remarkable man - a gift to the world in our lifetime, and although you may not agree with everything the man says, deep in your heart you know the man is right - we can be better than we are. The thing to remember is that the Pope is CATHOLIC. He is going to take the highest Catholic stance on matters of faith and morals. If the non-Catholics of the world don't like what he has to say, too bad. The Catholic Church can take it, and it will still be around long after the bashers and hate mongers are gone. Any change in the Church will take place over time, with much thought and prayer. Bernstein and Polito did a relatively well-balanced job in the beginning of the book, but then got into the politics and moral stances of the Church, and it is evident that they have their own opinions on these. I don't care what they think, and I don't think they have any business criticizing a church that (at least one of them) they don't belong to. John Paul II is a wonderful man, perhaps one of the most influential of this last half -century, and the most-gifted Pope the Church has ever had.

31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Grinding the same old axes, July 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: His Holiness (Paperback)

Bernstein and Politi's biography of the Holy Father, John Paul II, is informative and intriguing, but these secular journalists just can't resist the temptation to harp on the same issues the world has with the Catholic Church.

Bernstein and Politi explode the myth that John Paul I was murdered in a "Vatican conspiracy," but they cannot see past the conspiracy to spread calumny against the Pope of WWII, Pius XII. When speaking of John Paul II's life during the war and later of his work as Pope to improve relations between Catholics and Jews, Bernstein and Politi cannot resist slamming Pius XII for his alleged "silence" and "inactivity" in saving Jews, when the fact is that the Orthodox Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide has estimated that Pius XII and the Catholic Church were responsible for saving over 800,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Then there are the attempts by Bernstein and Politi to flog the dead horses of artificial contraception, abortion, and women's ordination. Instead of acknowledging that John Paul II is merely witnessing to the two thousand year tradition of the Catholic Church in denouncing artificial contraception, abortion, and women's ordination as incompatible with Christianity, these supposedly objective journalists attempt to psychoanalyze the Holy Father. According to these two, instead of upholding Catholic doctrine, the only reason the Holy Father condemns these things and at the same time reaffirms the sanctity of life and the holy vocation of motherhood is because he misses his mommy. Please! Of course the Holy Father's mother, Emilia Wojtyla, was an important influence on her son's life but this kind of amateur psychoanalysis on the parts of Bernstein and Politi is insulting not only to John Paul II but to those who already consider him John Paul the Great.

The authors' obviously liberal bias makes one question the rest of this biography's credibility and objectivity.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Political Part was OK, April 30, 2005

By 

Bruce J. Kratofil (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: His Holiness (Paperback)

Among the many books written about Pope John Paul II, the book by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness, stands out. That's because it's focus is on the role played by the Pope, working along with the Reagan Administration, in causing the fall of communism.

This was a delicate balancing act for John Paul. As Stalin so famously pointed out about a previous pope, he had no military power, only moral and spiritual power. As they recount his first trip as Pope back to Poland

"What was talking place now in Warsaw's Victory Square was a breakthrough to unknown horizons. John Paul II never uttered a word that might lead directly to a confrontation between Church and state, between the party and Christian believers, but everything he said marked the beginning of a grand turnabout for the Church -- in Poland, in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, in world affairs. Through him the Church was laying claim to a new role, no longer simply asking space for itself. Through him it was demanding respect for human rights as well as for Christian values, respect for every man and woman and for the autonomy of the individual. These demands represented a direct assault on the universal pretensions of Marxist ideology, which by now had become an empty shell in the countries under Soviet influence."



A campaign just by Solidarity, even aided by the Pope, may have gotten no farther than the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechs in 1968. What was different now was that the West, especially the Reagan Administration in the US, and Margaret Thatcher's government in Great Britain, had moved away from detente and began to actively push back. John Paul II had similarly moved away from the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI. The book details the co-operation in intelligence between the US and the Vatican. It also provides, through Politburo minutes obtained by the authors, the futile attempts by the old men of the Kremlin, and later the unsuccessful attempts of the younger Gorbachev, to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

This book, which was released in 1996, was a five year collaboration between Carl Bernstein (best-known for his work with Bob Woodward in All the President's Men and The Final Days) and Marco Politi, who is both the dean of Vatican journalists working for La Repubblica and then Il Messaggero, and a former Moscow correspondent. Countering a criticism, over how do we know what was really said at private meetings recounted in these exposé books, this book is quite detailed in its sourcing. The authors conducted, and documented, a long series of interviews with the people involved, up to and including President Reagan. The participants are quoted directly, and a Sources section at the back of the book shows who said what.

The book probably would have done better focusing strictly on the East-West struggles, but it was extended to include both a short biography of John Paul II's early life, plus a critique in the latter part of the book of the theological controversies during John Paul's long reign (and there were still nine years to go after the book came out.) While I'm interested in having Carl Bernstein as a guide through some of the great political struggles of the late 20th century, I really don't need him as a theology teacher.

While this isn't a new book, it is an interesting retrospective on one part of John Paul II's papacy.