UNITED KINGDOM
Breitbart
On Monday, the BBC aired a “documentary” called The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II, suggesting a possible lack of propriety in the revered late pontiff’s friendships with women over the years, and especially with a married colleague, the Polish philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.
The documentary by Edward Stourton, loosely based on a cache of letters from John Paul to Tymieniecka that convey a deep friendship but nothing even remotely sexual, has sparked a flurry of prurient speculation about the Pope, with steamy titles like “Did John Paul II Fall in Love with Married American Academic? BBC to Investigate” and “Did Pope John Paul II Have a Secret Lover?”
Despite talk of the late pope’s “secret relationships with women,” there is nothing in the documentary that is either new or secret, according to papal biographer George Weigel, who has called the frenzy spawned by the BBC a “tempest in a teapot.”
Weigel, who wrote the best-selling biography of John Paul, Witness to Hope, says that the BBC documentary reveals nothing really new about John Paul, but “it does tell us a something about the decline of the BBC as a source of serious television reporting.”
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