Viking £20 pp310

It is startling to look back over the present papacy, and measure just how far the Roman Catholic Church has fallen. John Cornwell’s The Pope in Winter, with its blunt subtitle, begins with a retrospective. It has to. These days, when the faithful of all religions are regarded with suspicion, and the Catholic Church is mired in scandal, it is easy to forget that this pope’s influence once reached out far beyond the Vatican.

In the beginning, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, even atheists admired John Paul. He was the Princess Diana of popes; the People’s Pope. The first non-Italian pontiff in donkey’s years was a charismatic Pole, who had suffered under the Nazis and kept up a constant battle with Poland’s Soviet oppressors. He was a man who made peace seem possible. His emotional sermons, delivered before vast and adoring crowds, made Catholicism look vibrant and glamorous. He firmly supported the Solidarity trade union movement that was to liberate the Polish people and light the fuse of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

The image of that white-clad figure, stooping to kiss the tarmac when he arrived in each new country, is now as dated as padded shoulders. These days, people think less of John Paul’s contribution to the ending of the cold war, and more of his dogmatism, narrow-mindedness and sheer wrong-headedness. At what point, Cornwell asks, did he stop being the white hope of the world, and start turning into the stubborn old martinet who won’t allow his priests to fight the spread of Aids with condoms? How did the man who once carried a starving Jewish girl on his back for 3km become the man who betrayed countless young people by supporting priests he knew to be abusers?

He was born Karol Wojtyla in 1920, in Wadowice. His mother died when he was nine. His father, a stern former NCO, was imbued with a typically Polish devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Cornwell vividly describes the bizarre, theatrical flavour of the local worship — for instance, following an open coffin containing an effigy of the dead Virgin before her Assumption into heaven. You don’t need to be Dr Freud to wonder about the effect this had on the motherless boy. Karol adored the Virgin, and he remains convinced that her personal intervention has, on several occasions, saved his life.

During the war, he was knocked down by a truck and came perilously close to death. In 1981, a Turkish assassin, probably working for the Bulgarian government, took a shot at him in St Peter’s Square. John Paul is still certain that the “motherly hand” of Mary kept the bullet away from his vital organs. For Poles of JP2’s generation, Cornwell explains, a love for the Virgin is inextricably bound up with patriotism — remember the gaudy “holy Virgin pen” with which Lech Walesa used to sign papers in the glory days of Solidarity? She was the symbol and figurehead of the Polish revolution. It was a mistake for the faithful to assume, however, that John Paul would support any other revolutions — particularly if they were happening inside the Church, and threatened to erode his traditional power base.

The second half of this book, once the history has been dealt with, addresses the problems of the present, issue by issue. More in sorrow than anger, Cornwell catalogues JP2’s apparent contempt for women, his refusal to listen to his embattled grassroots, his production-line of dodgy saints, his stubborn opposition to contraception and — above everything — his total failure to deal with the sex-abuse scandal that threatens to bankrupt Holy Mother Church, as well as covering her in shame. Cornwell points out that the offenders were not paedophiles molesting infants, but the facts are grim enough: 80% of the victims were boys, aged 13 and up, and their abusers used them cynically, sure that they would get away with treating schools and seminaries as their private gay brothels. Time and again, John Paul has protected (and sometimes promoted) priests who should have been instantly defrocked. The instinct, inside the Vatican, is to cover up. Cornwell’s is to expose, as a matter of urgency.

The spiritual leader of a billion Catholics is now an ailing and confused old man, who may even be suffering from paranoia and psychosis caused by his Parkinson’s disease. In the absence of proper leadership, says Cornwell, his Polish secretary and a handful of “ageing reactionary cardinals” are running the Church. John Paul’s pain-racked, palsied old body is wheeled about on casters, his voice a shadow of its old, booming self. Yet he is still here, clinging to life. Without putting it into so many words, Cornwell warns that unless the poor old soul dies soon, the Catholic Church will disintegrate around him. “John Paul’s successor will inherit a dysfunctional Church fraught with problems . . . A progressive pope, a papal Mikhail Gorbachev, could find himself presiding over a sudden and disastrous schism as conservatives refuse to accept the authenticity of progressive reforms.”

But can a pope retire? Can a retired pope coexist with a current pope? And (if the worst comes to the worst) what is the protocol if a pope loses his mind? Cornwell has a detailed knowledge of the Vatican’s inner workings. He writes with an obvious respect for the Church, but that does not stop him asking some extremely awkward questions. His book is immaculately researched and his conclusions are deeply disturbing. The Pope in Winter should be read by every Roman Catholic, and by every other variety of Christian. We are all connected, whether or not we care to admit it, and if Rome falls, she will bring the whole lot down with her.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy