Friday, November 25, 2005

Biography of JPII, "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" released

The New York Sun

The Shoes of the Fisherman
Biography

By CARL ROLLYSON - Special to the Sun
November 23, 2005

Hagiography is often a term of abuse, as though a biographer has idealized or sentimentalized the subject, or emphasized the heroic over the humble, the saint over the sinner. To be hagiographic is to be atavistic, harking back to the pre-modern, pre-secular world where the fraught dynamics of human psychology were suppressed in favor of extolling the exemplary figure. And yet here is Peggy Noonan, a believing Catholic, describing an audience with Pope John Paul II:

His cassock was too short - six inches off the floor. We could see his white cotton sports socks. We could see his worn brown shoes! He wears old brown loafers, like a working man, and not the traditional dainty slippers of a pope.

Biographies excite a craving for such details about the late and the great. John Paul II, Ms. Noonan implies, remained always the same man who worked in a chemical factory in Nazi occupied Poland while studying clandestinely for the priesthood.
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