While O’Sullivan is at his best dealing with the high politics of the Cold War, which inevitably propels both Thatcher and Reagan to the front of the stage, he is also a perceptive historian of ideas. And it is with his analysis of the moral breakdown of Communism that the story of John Paul II comes into its own. Although O’Sullivan has more to say about Reagan and Thatcher’s actions than the late Pontiff’s — and at one point the character of Gorbachev almost eclipses the Pope from the narrative — the point is nevertheless powerfully made that the defeat of Communism was ultimately a victory for a superior morality,
The Pope is not, it must be said, transformed into a Thatcherite in Holy Orders and the divergence between Catholic social doctrine and Hayekian liberalism is clearly delineated. But O’Sullivan points out that in his resistance to establishment appeasement, in his distrust of the sub-Marxist thought which drove ideologies such as liberation theology and in his unstinting support for the freedom of conscience which Communism sought to stifle, the Pope was undoubtedly a determined Cold Warrior.
John Paul II was, of course, much more than that. And readers anxious to appreciate just how momentous his pontificate has been, how philosophically distinguished and how spiritually vital, will want to read more widely, and pick up George Weigel’s biography. But O’Sullivan has done us all a service by showing how these three remarkable individuals answered the call of the hour.
When they came to office at the beginning of the 1980s the West was suffering from a profound lack of confidence, it was in ideological retreat in the face of totalitarian advance, it was fearful of military engagement after interventions abroad had provoked division at home and exhaustion haunted the faces of its leaders. O’Sullivan’s account of what went right after so much had gone wrong is, like his subjects, genuinely inspiring.
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