October 30th, 2005
John Paul II and the World’s Debt to Poland
George Weigel, former President and now Senior Fellow of the Ethics
and Public Policy Center, is a Roman Catholic theologian and one of the
world’s leading commentators on religion and public life. He has been
writing about the Pope since the first days of the pontificate of John
Paul II. George Weigel is also the author or editor of fourteen books on
theology, politics, and culture. Among them is his book, The Final
Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism , in
which he argued that the Polish Pontiff, not Reagan or Gorbachev, played
the crucial role in the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
reading that book the Pope personally asked Mr. Weigel to write a
biography “from inside,” as he was not satisfied with the ones that were
available up to that point. The result was Witness to Hope, the
international bestseller and definitive biography of Pope John Paul II.
It has been translated into over a dozen languages and was recently
updated to include the last moments of the Polish Pontiff’s legacy.
This lecture was organized in cooperation with the University of
Washington History and Slavic Departments and REECAS.