Pope's conversations with friends to be published as book

The Associated Press reports that a series of conversations John Paul II had with "his close friends political philosopher Krzysztof Michalski and the late Rev. Jozef Tischner in 1993" will be published in Italy by Rizzoli on February 23. A version in English will follow. The book's title is Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums.

The AP story concerns itself mostly with what the Pope had to say about the failed attempt to kill him in 1981, when a professional assassin, Ali Agca, shot him in St. Peter's Square. John Paul II agrees that Agca was not acting on his own, but was hired to do the job. He does not speculate on who hired Agca, but others have suggested that agents from then-Communist Bulgaria coordinated the assassination attempt for the Soviet KGB. The Pope has said he doesn't buy the Bulgarian connection. (What say you, Vladimir Putin?)

Given less emphasis in the story is what the Pope has to say about democracy and its moral limits:

On other topics, the pope says the Holocaust and abortion both came about when people decided to usurp "the law of God."

"It was a legally elected parliament which allowed for the election of Hitler in Germany in the 1930s and then the same Reichstag that gave Hitler powers which paved a way for the political invasion of Europe and to the creation of concentration camps and for introducing the so-called 'final solution' of the Jewish question, which meant the extermination of millions of sons and daughters of Israel."

The pope continued, "We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present day democracies. The most direct association which comes to mind is the abortion laws. ... Parliaments which create and promulgate such laws must be aware that they are transgressing their powers and remain in open conflict with the law of God and the law of nature."

In the book, the pope said the countries freed from Soviet domination and communist rule at the end of the Cold War — including his native Poland, which is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic — must resist cultural influences from largely secular Western Europe.

He wrote that during the struggle against communism, "this part of Europe has completed a task of spiritual maturing thanks to which certain values important for human life were devalued less than in the West."

Something that I take away from that, and from the "facts on the ground," as they say, in Western Europe, is that the Pope has largely written off the traditional center of Western civilization. In a sense, he sees that the barbarians have sacked the capitals of the Old World.

More about that at a later time.