SOURCE: “Pope Fiction,” in New Republic, December 24, 1994, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, Paglia offers positive evaluation of Crossing the Threshold of Hope. According to Paglia, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope comes as a stunning display not of Catholic autocracy but of the ideological flexibility and rueful insight of the modern mind.”

The pope speaks. But Crossing the Threshold of Hope is a peculiar document. Each chapter opens with the journalist Vittorio Messori's questions, sometimes bold and querulous, sometimes obsequious and honorific in the Italian way—“Allow me to play, although respectfully, the gadfly.” The pope then replies at length, his reflections moving impressionistically from the philosophical and theological to the historical and autobiographical. The didactic structure of Catholic catechism is thus reversed. During preparation for the sacrament of confirmation, for example, the preceptor asks, and the novice answers. But in John Paul II's book, the ultimate authority...