Viewpoint: Pope John Paul II and his 'secret letters' to a woman friend

The BBC 'documentary' that aired on February 15, The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II, tells us nothing really new about John Paul, George Weigel writes in the National Review. But it does tell us a something about the decline of the BBC as a source of serious television reporting, even as it illuminates the misconceptions under which too much secular journalism operates when writing about the Catholic Church, its clergy, and celibacy.

Longtime BBC talking head Edward Stourton's program is based on a cache of letters from Karol Wojtyła/Pope John Paul II to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a Polish philosopher who was, as has long been known, a friend of Wojtyła's. The letters reflect a deep and searching friendship, not unlike other letters of Wojtyła's, some of which I reprinted in the first volume of my biography of the pope, Witness to Hope. Stourton, however, takes Wojtyła's letters to Tymieniecka (who died in 2014), throws them into the Freudian Mixmaster with the previously published correspondence between Wojtyła/John Paul and another old friend, the Polish psychologist Wanda Połtawska, and then suggests that there was something intriguing here, something that, while not quite untoward, should nonetheless change our perceptions of John Paul II (wink, wink, nod, nod).

Read more at: www.nationalreview.com/article/431359/pope-john-paul-ii-letters-women-celibacy?z0Akh9SXkZ5RHeja.01