PARIS — Defying a pope’s explicit instructions is not a widespread habit among Roman Catholic cardinals, especially when the pope in question is immensely popular, on the verge of sainthood and no longer able to object.

So the decision by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz to publish a book of Pope John Paul II’s personal notes, even though the pope’s last will and testament requested that he burn them, has attracted no small helping of controversy and moral indignation.

The book, “I Am Very Much in God’s Hands,” is due to be published Wednesday in Poland, John Paul’s native land. And many in the abidingly Catholic and conservative country are greeting it as an unholy betrayal — not least because Cardinal Dziwisz, now the archbishop of Krakow, was John Paul’s secretary throughout his pontificate, and one of his closest confidants.

Cardinal Dziwisz recently told reporters that he “did not have the courage” to follow John Paul’s orders to destroy the notes, which contain religious meditations written from July 1962, when he was a young bishop on the rise, to March 2003, when he had been pope for more than 24 years and Parkinson’s disease was eroding his health. John Paul, who died in 2005, will be canonized at the Vatican on April 27.