The Biography of Pope John Paul II.

By George Weigel.

Illustrated. 992 pp. New York:

Cliff Street Books. $35.

They never flinched. In the early morning hours of Sept. 1, 1939, the Rev. Kazimierz Figlewicz was celebrating mass in the north nave of Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, with his acolyte, 19-year-old Karol Wojtyla, at an altar near the silver casket bearing the remains of St. Stanislaw, the patron of Poland. Air raid sirens went off and moments later there was antiaircraft fire and the sound of the Luftwaffe's bombs. ''Case White,'' Hitler's code name for the invasion of Poland, was underway; so was World War II. Inside the cathedral, the congregants scattered, but Figlewicz and Wojtyla did not. The two finished the Mass.

There it all was, even in the beginning: the acolyte, the future Pope John Paul II, publicly and defiantly holding fast to the faith in the face of the world's most destructive forces. George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian and senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, has written an exhaustive account of John Paul's life and pontificate, a book that will become a standard for students of church history and that sheds light on the history of the 20th century for everyone. ''Witness to Hope'' is a big book about a big man, a Polish priest who lost his mother early, endured the German occupation, considered a career on the stage, led the Polish church in the long years of Communist domination and, as a telegenic Vicar of Christ, helped ignite the fires of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. He is, with Ronald Reagan and Nelson Mandela, one of the last living lions of the age.

His face is arguably the world's most familiar, yet John Paul may be, as Weigel puts it, ''the least understood major figure of the 20th century.'' To many, he was a key player in the West's victory in the cold war, providing moral force (and, with his roots in post-Yalta Poland, personal witness) in the struggle against Moscow and in the continuing battles for human rights in China and elsewhere. To others, including many believing Catholics, this champion of freedom is an intractable religious authoritarian who leads a church that, with its refusal to countenance contraception, seems to have a disproportionate interest in what happens in its followers' bedrooms.

In truth, he is both political hero and ecclesiastical enforcer, a media-savvy poet, philosopher and pastor guided by a vision of Christian humanism that holds that securing the dignity of every person is the noblest human aspiration. For the pope, the Incarnation of Christ sanctified human life; God's love, which created and sustains the world, can be rightly encountered only in freedom. Thus the pope's war against anything that he believes threatens the human enterprise: totalitarianism, religious persecution, the dissolution of the family. Casual observers who want to pick and choose among his passions -- who, say, approve of his anti-Communism but would prefer him to favor the right to abortion -- fail to understand that, for better or for worse, the two positions are part of the same fabric. Whether a fetus or a shipyard worker in Gdansk, we are all God's creatures, made holy by the Incarnation and redeemed by the Resurrection, and all worthy of the protection of the church. Weigel makes clear that for John Paul II this is a conviction, not a political platform; in the pope's view, it's up to the world to meet the standards of the faith, not the other way around. And it is, in a dim time, an essentially bright vision. In his first sermon as pope, he echoed Jesus' reassuring words ''Be not afraid!''

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Life for Karol Wojtyla has not always been so certain, or cheerful. Born in Wadowice on May 18, 1920, to a father who was a military officer, he had modest but middle-class origins. He lost his mother at 6 and his older brother at 12; after that, the boy, known as Lolek, grew up fast, absorbing both the faith and sweeping romantic Polish legends. His father, known as the captain, would read his son a verse trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz in which Polish patriots defend the Jasna Gora monastery, home of the icon of the Black Madonna. ''The enemy jeers at us and despises us, asking what's left of our former virtues,'' the poem thunders. ''And I'll tell him this much: we've lost them all but one, and that is our faith and the honor we show to the Holy Mother, and that is the foundation on which we can reconstruct the rest.''

Heady stuff for a youngster drawn to the dramatic. As he prepared for university, Wojtyla impressed the aristocratic archbishop of Krakow, Adam Stefan Sapieha, who asked whether the young man might make a good priest. Told that Wojtyla was more interested in literature and the theater, the prelate replied, ''a pity.'' The archbishop needn't have worried: both the stage and the altar are about convincing people of a reality they cannot see, and both require, in the best actors and the most effective pastors, a capacity to project and charm. Around the time of the death of his father, in early 1941, Wojtyla began moving toward the priesthood, ultimately attending a secret seminary while doing hard manual labor under the German occupation.

Weigel's enormous and fascinating chronicle, running at nearly 1,000 pages, is the capstone of 20 years of watching and writing about John Paul II. An earlier Weigel book, ''The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism,'' made the groundbreaking case that the pope had been instrumental in ending the cold war, and it was that book that led to this one. After its publication, the pope invited the author to a private Mass, then to a series of meals. Weigel was granted extraordinary access to John Paul II and to Vatican officials and documents. Though the Holy See had no rights of approval, it will not be displeased. Weigel's work is a relentless defense of just about anything this pope has ever done, said, written or thought. The author does note an occasional ''strategic'' papal error -- chiefly in a discussion of the poor reception that greeted the pope's refusal to consider ordaining women to the priesthood -- but there is little doubt that Weigel has given the Catholicism of the future plenty of supporting evidence if it chooses to call this pope ''John Paul the Great'' one day.

Weigel's portrait offers telling details about what the pope is like offstage. Behind the scenes John Paul II seems a curious combination of genial friend and abstract thinker, a busy pastor who often ran late -- on, colleagues wryly noted, ''Wojtyla Standard Time.'' In Poland, as priest, archbishop and cardinal, he was the central figure in a broad collection of friends, most of them married with children, whom the pope calls his ''Srodowisko,'' or ''milieu.'' First formed during his university chaplaincy days in the early 50's in Krakow, the group calls John Paul ''wujek,'' or ''uncle''; from 1953 until August 1978, when he was elected pope, he kayaked and hiked with this ''little family.'' He never lost his love of plays and poetry (as a cardinal at Vatican II, he passed the time partly by composing verse), and his long intellectual paper trail of dense philosophical writings led some to underestimate his charisma. The Communist leadership in Poland, for example, actually wanted him as archbishop of Krakow, figuring his philosophical bent and youth would enable the party to control him.

They could not have made a bigger mistake. The cold war ended not least because of the system's intrinsic weaknesses and the West's military buildup, but by the time he became John Paul II, Wojtyla, with his tough and vocal defense of religious freedom, had established himself as a potential problem for Moscow. When the party was weighing whether to allow the new pope to make a pilgrimage home in the early days of Solidarity, Leonid I. Brezhnev advised his comrades in Warsaw against it, saying, ''It will only cause trouble.'' John Paul II's amazing nine-day tour in 1979 certainly did: a third of the nation, 13 million people, saw him in person; his message was clear, his courage infectious. ''The future of Poland,'' he said, ''will depend on how many people are mature enough to be nonconformist.'' A little more than a year later, using a pen emblazoned with the face of the pope, Lech Walesa signed an agreement with the Communist government recognizing the legality of Solidarity, the first independent, self-governing labor union behind the Iron Curtain.

It would take another decade for Mikhail Gorbachev to dissolve the Soviet Union, but the course was set in part by a charming Slav with bitter personal experience of the Third Reich who had been weaned on a national myth that linked the faith to a free fatherland. Quoting G. K. Chesterton on Thomas More, Weigel argues that the pope ''was above all things, historic: he represented at once a type, a turning point and an ultimate destiny. If there had not been that particular man at that particular moment, the whole of history would have been different.'' In St. John's Gospel, Christ tells his disciples, ''Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.'' As Weigel's sweeping history makes clear, few men have borne better witness to that truth than this pope.

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