Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis review – the gospel according to…
Popes seldom lack a platform or a pulpit, so they have had little need to resort to autobiography to explain themselves. What books do appear under their names in recent decades have been either dull transcriptions of interviews with tame journalists that have been heavily vetted by the Vatican, or compilations of old sermons packaged as something more than they are.
I therefore approached this new volume with a certain weary caution and was pleasantly surprised. It fully justifies its bold claim to be the first ever memoir by a living pope. Indeed, Francis’s Italian ghostwriter, the publisher Carlo Musso, reveals in a brief afterword that the original plan when the book was commissioned in 2019 was that it would not appear until after his death. So why the sudden urgency?
Well, at 88 and increasingly physically frail (he uses a wheelchair a lot of the time now), the Argentinian pope who declared himself to be someone from almost “the end of the world” when introduced to crowds in St Peter’s Square after his surprise election in March 2013 clearly believes that his mission to reform his church and re-engage it with the modern world still has a long way to go. And books require far less energy than travelling round the globe to meet his flock, while their potential reach beyond the pews is attractive to one who has always had higher approval ratings in the world at large than among the significant minority of stubborn defenders of tradition – “backward-ism” he calls it in these pages – within his own church.
Francis insists that contrary to speculation, he did not propose marriage to two women before feeling called by God in his late teens
Moreover, the memoir format suits perfectly this warm, emotionally intelligent figure who has demonstrated a folksy charm over the past 12 years, repeatedly recounting tales of growing up as the son of Italian immigrants in Argentina in the late 1930s and 40s. Here, for the first time, he nails down details of that upbringing that have thus far escaped would-be biographers.
Francis insists, for example, that contrary to speculation he did not propose marriage to two women before feeling called by God in his late teens to priesthood. Knowing that would have saved me a lot of time when I was sent to Argentina by a newspaper to mark the first anniversary of his election as pope – as part of my brief was to try to contact those past girlfriends in Flores, the district in Buenos Aires where the man born Jorge Mario Bergoglio grew up.
The in-and-outs of his family life take up a good half of this book, but it is an enjoyable indulgence that also serves a wider purpose. Francis is never so crude as to repeat the line often uttered by less articulate Catholic priests that they too grew up in a family and so, despite having taken a vow of celibacy, are well-placed to advise their parishioners on the challenges of married life. Instead, he is at pains to emphasise just what a normal guy he is. “I’m a citizen at heart,” he says – someone who loves football, adores cutting-edge cinema, wasn’t a swot at school, and has suffered “melancholy spells” periodically since his 10th birthday.
He also draws on his family background as economic and political migrants from Mussolini’s Italy in 1929 to good effect, making an important and impassioned plea for today’s world to behave with more compassion and humanity towards those fleeing their home country for similar reasons. Likewise, the slaughter that his father, Mario, witnessed during military service in the first world war prefaces his outspoken opposition to warfare and his prescient warning that a future global conflict is “beginning in hearts” in our age of intolerance and ultra-nationalism.
Elsewhere, on the chronological skeleton of his biography, he hangs many of the causes for which he has been among the most persistent advocates on the international stage: the poverty he witnessed while working with the marginalised of Buenos Aires’s villas miseria or shantytowns; the devastation already being caused by the climate crisis that he has seen on his travels as pope; the corruption of culture and threat to youngsters posed by unregulated media. On sex, usually such an obsession of Catholicism, he is all but silent.
In his introduction, Francis states that “an autobiography is not our private story, but rather the baggage we carry with us”. His meaning becomes clearer as the book progresses and he addresses the criticisms and controversy – the baggage as he would have it – that has dogged his papacy. He has made “many mistakes”, he confesses, but then doesn’t say what they were.
The main reason for my trip to Argentina a year after his election was to meet some of those who, at the time of Bergoglio’s election as pope in 2013, insisted that as a young provincial superior (regional leader) of the Jesuits in the mid-1970s, when 30,000 of his fellow citizens died or “disappeared” at the hands of the ruling military junta, he did not do enough to hold the murderous regime to account.
Chief among the accusations is that he didn’t try hard enough to protect two radical Jesuit priests under his charge, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, who worked in the shantytowns. They were detained for five months in May 1976 and tortured. In his brief and unenlightening account of this episode, Francis sidesteps any mention of the criticism of his actions in their case – including from Father Yorio, who told friends before his death that Bergoglio had betrayed him – and prefers to give a list of others he tried to help.
It is one of a number of instances where recollections differ. “After my apostolic journey to Chile in 2018,” the pope writes, “I would learn over the following months the full extent of the many abuses in the diocese of Osorno.” He is referring to the scandal of clerical sex abuse revealed there but offers no more details.
What actually happened was that, on the visit, he was confronted by a crowd of local Catholics who objected to Francis’s choice for their local bishop on the grounds that the individual in question had covered up the crimes of a predator priest. In the full gaze of the world’s press, the pope angrily dismissed the protesters and accused them of “calumny”. It caused the head of the Vatican’s own sex abuse commission to rebuke his boss publicly.
In the end this is a book of two halves – the instinct to share every last detail about his younger years is replaced in later sections with more selective memories. To understate his own errors as part of Catholicism’s colossal failure to protect children in its care from sexual abuse by priests weakens the power of his message in these pages – as it does the mission of the church in the world. So while this is a groundbreaking autobiography, the “hope” of its title surely requires more plain-speaking – particularly in an age when truth is being downgraded.
Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald
• Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis is published by Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
