Hagiography is often a term of abuse, as though a biographer has idealized or sentimentalized the subject, or emphasized the heroic over the humble, the saint over the sinner. To be hagiographic is to be atavistic, harking back to the pre-modern, pre-secular world where the fraught dynamics of human psychology were suppressed in favor of extolling the exemplary figure. And yet here is Peggy Noonan, a believing Catholic, describing an audience with Pope John Paul II:

His cassock was too short – six inches off the floor. We could see his white cotton sports socks. We could see his worn brown shoes! He wears old brown loafers, like a working man, and not the traditional dainty slippers of a pope.

Biographies excite a craving for such details about the late and the great. John Paul II, Ms. Noonan implies, remained always the same man who worked in a chemical factory in Nazi occupied Poland while studying clandestinely for the priesthood.

“John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father” (Viking, 256 pages, $24.95) seems to me nothing less than a rehabilitation of hagiography. Ms. Noonan is unabashed in calling the pope a saint and in speaking the language of faith. She believes that God is a person, and that John Paul is in heaven. “These thoughts seem sentimental, but I do not mean them so,” she insists. “I have become a person who believes these things.”

This confession – and Ms. Noonan’s book is as much autobiography as biography – reminds me of St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” His gift to biography was to make the saint’s life both a study in sanctity and an acknowledgment of sin. If John Paul the Great, as Ms. Noonan styles him, is her spiritual father, it is because, like Augustine, his holiness is of this world – a matter not of dainty slippers but of work shoes.

Ms. Noonan notes that the pope was a poet, a playwright, and an athlete – a man very much at home in his body and comfortable, for example, with the idea of human sexuality. If he maintained the Catholic Church’s traditional teachings about birth control and abortion (it is curious that she does not explore his attachment to the celibacy of the priesthood), it was not out of some kind of puritan rejection of sensuality. On the contrary, it was because sexuality was such a powerful driving force in the human psyche that he felt it ought to be channeled into the love of the body and soul that graces a marriage.

Ms. Noonan sees the very strengths of her spiritual father as allied to his failings. Because his own calling to the priesthood came at a time when it was a crime, he could not grasp the catastrophe that has overtaken the American Catholic Church. In Poland, priests were the very bulwark of society, and as a parish priest, John Paul II participated in the intimate lives of his spiritual community. That American priests could so abuse their privilege and authority as to molest the children in their charge was hard for him to believe. It was, he thought, an overblown press controversy.

Ms. Noonan is unsparing in revealing the pope’s blind side even as she delineates his saintly life, his robust working man’s sensibility, and his courageous public dying, making himself a symbol of the virtue of suffering and taking his life to its full term because life is sacred in every sense.

I was reminded of Ms. Noonan’s working-class pope in his old brown loafers when she calls on Bernard Law and the other fathers of the church to relinquish their mansions and limousines. The biographer holds the American cardinal directly responsible for the Church’s sexual scandal, and in one of her book’s most dramatic moments confronts Cardinal Law. He tells her, “Well, the cardinal only lives in a modest room, and there have to be conference rooms, and how would it look if I’d refused to live there, what would it say about my predecessor, how would it look?” Ms. Noonan’s reply (I think made only to herself) was “How would it look? It would look good. But more to the point, they should not be worrying about how things look; they should be worrying about how things are.”

Ms. Noonan believes that the church hierarchy in this country still does not understand how devastating the sexual scandal has been, and that only a new generation of priests and nuns can rectify the damage. This hope is not quite fleshed out in the biography and is countered by a troubling awareness: “We are suffering, in the West, through an imbalanced period of cultural history, a time that seems to mark both an obsessive interest in and an anxious, even combative attitude toward the human body.”

When Ms. Noonan writes that “we seem not so comfortable in our own skin,” she is responding to the rift between body and soul that poets like John Paul II and William Butler Yeats sought to heal. Ms. Noonan is no Crazy Jane, but I could not help but think of Yeats’s great poem, “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop,” and Jane’s retort to the holy man who scorns her “bodily lowliness”: “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”

Hagiography seeks to heal the split. If Ms. Noonan cannot quite bring off that miracle, the sensitive nature of her quest is such that she has written a work of a high order.