By Catherine Pepinster
The first autobiography by a reigning pope is published across the world today, and looks likely to climb the bestseller lists with its promise of insights into the life of Francis, his beliefs, and how he came to be elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion members.
The book, Hope: the Autobiography, gives his own detailed account of the conclave of 2013 that led to him being elected to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, who had shocked the world by becoming the first pontiff since the 13th century to resign.
And Francis, 88, uses this memoir to rule out following in his footsteps, unless ill-health seriously impedes his work. He admits: “These years of my papacy have been a life of tension … But old age is always a time of grace and even of growth.”
He describes his time as pope as being very difficult with tensions with Vatican officials over his efforts to reform the church’s workings. “I have been summoned to a battle,” he writes.
One of the main revelations of the book is his disclosure that Benedict gave him a white box full of secret documents days after he was elected. The pair were photographed with the box at the time with some speculation that it might contain details of scandals, but after a Vatican source suggested that the box was full of emails the outgoing pope had not dealt with, the story died.
Now Pope Francis tells readers that Benedict told him about the box: “Everything is in here.” Francis then says that it contained “documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations: cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings”.
Although he does not go into details about the scandals, he also reveals that of the tasks he had to tackle: “Reform of the Roman Curia [the church’s officials] was the most demanding and … while there was resistance to change, in financial management, for example, it was not easy to move away from the curse of ‘it has always been done like this’ but now at last it is set on the right path,”
Among the scandals that have beset Pope Francis’s pontificate are those of child sexual abuse by priests and of sexual misconduct by senior clerics involving seminarians. The book includes several apologies from Francis and he says: “Victims must know the Pope is on their side.”
But he does not go into detail about particular cases, including a row he became embroiled in over links between bishops in Chile and an abusive priest, which he merely refers to, nor the case of the US cardinal Thomas McCarrick. Although he mentions McCarrick, the most senior cleric ever to be laicised — reduced to a layman — he does not explain why he previously said he had no knowledge of McCarrick’s behaviour until 2018, even though several complaints were made to the Vatican about him: the kind of scandal that was likely to be in Benedict’s box of scandals.
Hope also details Pope Francis’s early life as a child of an Italian migrant family in Argentina, his love of football, the tango, and opera, and how after studying chemistry, he joined the Jesuit order and became a priest.
His own migrant background is highlighted as a reason for his empathy for today’s migrants and he has frequently criticised governments for failing to act with compassion when dealing with people trying to start a new life, fleeing war, religious persecution and economic troubles.
There are warm words, too, in Hope for people of other faiths, including Judaism and Islam, gay people, divorced and remarried Catholics and the importance of women in the church. However, although he writes that women should be more fully involved in the church and play key roles — something he had ensured by giving women some senior positions in the Roman Curia — he has no enthusiasm for female priests.
Referring to Jesus’s mother and his apostle, Peter, he writes that: “Mary is more important than Peter and the mystical nature of the woman is greater than the ministry.”
His words are unlikely to satisfy critics who have urged him to least allow female deacons in the Catholic church, while more conservative Catholics will be unimpressed by Hope’s confirmation of his desire to engage laypeople more in the church, to focus more on the plight of the planet, and to involve himself in contentious political issues such as Gaza and Ukraine.
And while last week President Joe Biden announced that one of the final acts of his presidency was to award Pope Francis the US Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction — Biden has never before awarded it with distinction — the warm words are unlikely to be repeated by the incoming Donald Trump.
Francis’s comments on migrants stand in sharp relief to Trump’s, and the two men have recently made appointments that suggest they will be on a collision course very soon. Last month, Trump nominated Brian Burch, political activist and founder of advocacy organisation CatholicVote, a critic of Francis, as US ambassador to the Holy See, saying: “[Burch] represented me well during the last election, having garnered more Catholic votes than any presidential candidate in history!”
Now Francis has appointed Robert McElroy, the Cardinal of San Diego, to be Archbishop of Washington. McElroy has regularly voiced sentiments about the care owed to migrants.
Steve Bannon, the Christian nationalist former Trump adviser, who is also Catholic, has described the Pope via his McElroy appointment to be heading for a significant row with the incoming Trump administration.
Hope: the autobiography of Pope Francis is published today by Penguin Viking
