A Portrait of John Paul II

by André Frossard

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898702771
• ISBN13: 9780898702774
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Length: 175 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

The Church before Pope John Paul II

Folks, I've been rereading this precious little book by French author André Frossard. You may remember Monsieur Frossard as the co-author and partner in dialogue of Pope John Paul's Be Not Afraid: Pope John Paul II Speaks Out on His Life, His Beliefs, and His Inspiring Vision for Humanity and a Catholic convert from atheism with several other printed works to his credit, particularly, I have met Him: God exists, the narrative of his conversion. The Portrait of Pope John Paul II is a series of impressions that Frossard derived from his encounters with the late Pope. The chapter entitled "Just Who is Karol Wojtyla and What Is He Going To Do?" contains a brief account of the state of the Church when Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope. It is one of my favorite paragraphs in the book and I hereby reproduce it, for your reading pleasure:To the disinterested observer, the Church was showing clear signs of internal disintegration. There were at least two Churches in Holland: one of them was playing at throwing its hat over the blades of the windmill and then attempting to catch it as it flew off on the other side; the other Church of Holland, the conservative one, called "anachronistic" and "reactionary", kept constantly on the defensive, even had its communications cut off by the windmill faction. In Germany, there was a theologian who persisted in calling himself a Catholic while inveighing against Rome in the manner of a Luther, but with rather less eloquence and rather more pedantry. In Spain, always very Catholic, the higher clergy let themselves float on the prevailing winds. In France, we watched the first punches thrown in the boxing match between an ultraconservative bishop so obsessed with the old liturgical formulas that he came close to branding the Second Vatican Council a work of the devil and an opposing clerical contingent manifestly ready to throw the liturgical and pastoral baby out with the bathwater, clergy who continually preached democracy and pluralism only to take refuge in their own divinely conferred rights every time they thought their authority was being questioned. This group, so easily led around by the nose that it was incredible, took the slightest objection as an insult and the meekest question as evidence of intolerable defiance. In the United States, some of the clergy who were persuaded that the best way to combat error is to appear to partake of it yourself, meddled in every conflict in contemporary society and fabricated a pastoral approach to homosexuality over the ruins of Christian marriage. In Latin America, the "popular churches" drew themselves up in full battle array against the institutional Church, all the while insisting, of course, that they were doing nothing of the sort. And I must not leave out Central America, where the superior of a contemplative order had all his monks psychoanalyzed and thereby emptied his monastery. He himself was the first to leave, so he could tie the knot with his gir