c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Three months before the papal visit to Cuba early last year, Fidel Castro was showing little desire to give Pope John Paul II the red-carpet treatment. Then a Vatican envoy brought a very personal message to the Cuban president, saying the pope was praying daily he find his way back to God. The Communist leader fell silent and then threw aside obstacles to a successful papal pilgrimage.

When talks on relations between the Vatican and Israel began faltering, an Israeli Franciscan convert opened a”back channel”to the government in Jerusalem, crafting a historic agreement resulting in formal diplomatic ties between the Holy See and the Jewish state. There would have been no negotiations at all if John Paul hadn’t overcome”historic prejudices”in the Roman curia.

At a pivotal turn in the former Soviet Union, John Paul acted as a sort of confessor to Andrei Sakharov, telling the Soviet physicist-turned-dissident he should not fear losing his soul if he entered politics. Sakharov returned from the Vatican meeting in 1989 to become a propelling figure in the government’s transition to democracy.

These inside accounts of papal events are detailed in a new biography of John Paul,”Witness to Hope”(HarperCollins), which lands in bookstores Tuesday (Oct. 5). Though it is not considered an official biography, the author, American theologian George Weigel, says he was granted unprecedented access to the pope and his closest aides.

One steady refrain of the 992-page book is John Paul’s refusal to be confined by a Roman bureaucracy that had frustrated many a pontiff before him. In Weigel’s interpretation, John Paul not only was elected as an outsider of the church’s central administration, but will die an outsider, too.

Weigel fleshes out the argument in his telling of events both big and small, from the pope’s determination to set things right with Israel and the Jews to a wedding he performed for the daughter of a Roman street cleaner shortly after his election. Weigel also tells of John Paul’s recourse to unofficial channels to pursue ongoing conversations with friends and other kindred spirits.

When he was elected to the papacy in 1978, Karol Wojtyla”didn’t think he needed instruction on how to be the Bishop of Rome from the traditional managers of popes,”Weigel said in an interview.”He’d been a diocesan bishop for 20 years, and he had settled convictions that bishops were first and foremost evangelists and pastors, not managers.” These convictions led the former Archbishop of Krakow to”break the mold of the managerial papacy, the pope as the CEO of the Roman Catholic Church Inc.,”he added.”I think that break has been decisive and irreversible.” Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, spent the last 3 1/2 years taking the measure of a larger-than-life subject, a man regarded by many as the only world leader left in the post-Communist age.

He contends that much of the reporting on the pope, including a few best-selling biographies, has approached him”from the outside,”as a statesman who happens to be a priest and a bishop. Weigel said he chose instead to examine John Paul from”the inside”of his Christian convictions that shape everything he says and does.

Relating a comment by one of the pope’s closest associates, Weigel said John Paul makes his most important decisions”on his knees,”while praying.”To think of him as a grandmaster playing on an ecclesiastical chessboard simply misses the essence of the man,”he said.”Witness to Hope”includes what the publisher is billing as previously unrevealed details of significant papal events, especially in the Vatican’s contacts with foreign states.

For example, Weigel reports on a seven-hour meeting that lasted late into the night between Castro and Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Walls. The Spaniard flew to Havana in October 1997, hoping to ease the way for John Paul’s arrival there three months later.

Weigel relates, from his interview with Navarro:”When the papal spokesman was ushered into the Cuban leader’s office at 7:45 p.m., Castro immediately said, `Tell me about the pope.’ Navarro answered, `Mr. President, I envy you.’ Castro asked, `Why?’ `Because,’ Navarro replied, `the pope is praying for you every day, praying that a man with your formation will find his way back to God.'”The voluble Castro was, for once, silent. Navarro proceeded to describe John Paul’s normal day, stressing that his hour of private prayer before his 7:30 a.m. Mass was the best part of the day for him. Listening to this, Navarro recalled later, Castro looked like a man rediscovering old things from his childhood.” In another milestone, four years earlier, the Vatican and Israel had exchanged ambassadors after years of negotiations. This formalizing of relations followed a so-called”Fundamental Agreement”reached in 1993, which also gave legal status, for the first time in modern Israel, to the Catholic church in the Holy Land.”It was clear that the pope wanted this result, and it was also clear that absent that signal, this was not going to be resolved,”Weigel said in the interview.

The core contention of”Witness to Hope”is that John Paul has broken the papal mold of the past few centuries and fixed a fundamentally pastoral course for the papacy, well into the next millennium.

One revealing instance of the pope as pastor to a world in transition was his conversation in Rome with Sakharov, who died in 1991. That encounter is reported _ for the first time, as far as Weigel knows _ in a section of the book on the pope’s contacts with Russians.

At the twilight of communism, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was wooing the popular human rights campaigner, urging him to run for the Congress of People’s Deputies. Sakharov was torn, wanting to make a difference, not wanting to be construed as endorsing Gorbachev, a reform Communist, or the Soviet system.

During the February 1989 meeting, Sakharov’s wife, Elena Bonner, a human rights leader in her own right, turned to her husband and said,”This may be the only place in the world where you can ask the question that’s tormenting you.” Sakharov, described by one friend as a”theist unsure about his relationship to God,”explained his dilemma to the pope. He then asked,”By getting into this game, am I directing it onto a better course, or will I be compromised?” Weigel writes,”It was the first time Andrei Sakharov had gone to confession, so to speak, in his long, difficult and heroic life.”John Paul thought about it for a while, saying nothing, just listening and reflecting. Then this veteran confessor said to Sakharov, `You have a clear and strong conscience. You can be sure you won’t make a mistake _ I think you can be of use.’ Sakharov, relieved of the fear that he would be used, went back to the Soviet Union and was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, where he quickly became the conscience of the reform movement.” While many quarters of the church are buzzing with speculation about a papal successor, Weigel predicts whoever comes next will be forced to follow the pastoral and”evangelical”path of John Paul.”The pope-as-CEO model is finished,”he said.”The church and the world both expect something more from the papacy now, and those who choose John Paul’s successor can’t help being aware of that.” DEA END BOLE