People’s pontiff | Review of Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis

Pope Francis brings humility, compassion, and change to the Papacy, addressing past wrongs and embracing a new era.

I heard the news at a working lunch. Pope Francis was gone and I felt a deep sorrow open up within me. It was like losing a... like losing a what? Not a friend but also a friend. A symbol of possibility and a harbinger of change. I do not ask for whom the bell tolls. I know it tolls for all liberal human beings. It has been a long time since we loved a Pope so much.

Towards the end of the John Paul II papacy, it became apparent that the Supreme Pontiff was no longer running the church; a cabal was doing its best to make the 2,000-year-old institution into a meaningless anachronism in a world in flux. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed as Bishop of Rome and the decline accelerated as the Holy Father wrote flawed encyclicals, ignored the savagery visited on children and pottered about changing formulae for the Mass, indulging in sophistry while the world was burning around his German ears. I talked to a priest friend who said grimly, “Well, at least there’s only one of him,” referring to the Great Western Schism when there were three men who were claiming the Seat of St. Peter.

We fell in love with the Papacy again when white smoke streamed out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and Cardinal Bergoglio was elected. Here was a Jesuit as a Pope which accounts for much of the change in the way his time in Rome has been conducted. The Jesuits may be the intellectual elites of the church but there has been an amazing lack of sophistry about this Pope who named himself after the simplest and most childlike of saints, Francis of Assisi.

He is the People’s Pope in much the same way as Diana, Princess of Wales, was the People’s Princess. He knows the value of the gesture. He knows what it means to the faithful that he is ‘still in touch’ with the many people whom he met as a priest, a bishop, a cardinal; that phrase runs like a leit motif through the book although, in the manner of the great Augustinian Confessions, he is at pains to recount the times he held himself aloof and lived to regret it.

But most of all, he understands the rage and the horror that the church’s protection of paedophiles has generated. He is unstinting in his condemnation in Hope: The Autobiography, cowritten with Carlo Musso and translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon: “The pain of the victims is a lament that rises to heaven, that touches the soul, and which for so long has been ignored, hidden or silenced. In the justified anger of the people, the Church sees the reflection of God’s anger, betrayed and besmirched by these dishonest priests.”

This is a preachment from a Pope and Franciscus does not wait until he has been ordained before he begins. We are treated to small sermons in retrospect as we follow his life but this is as it should be. For if you are going to read a book by a man who managed to get past the traditional dislike that Rome has for Jesuits — the order has been suppressed twice by the very men to whom they swear allegiance in what can only be an example of fine Italian irony — and the presence of an ex-Pope still hanging about Vatican City like a bad odour, you must gird your loins for this.

But he surprises you. How he surprises you. That he should make a postcard of ‘The Standing Boy of Nagasaki’ — a photograph of a little boy of about 10 years old who has the corpse of his dead brother strapped to his back — which he has titled, ‘The Fruit of War’ is remarkable. That he should beg at the feet of the leaders of South Sudan to end the war may be taken as a gesture but it is a gesture that few heads of state would make. That he should weigh in on climate change, that he should tell us that he read Communist literature when he was growing up, that he should refer to Ingmar Bergman and Giovanni Guareschi (on whose Don Camillo series I cut my teeth), that he once helped Jorge Luis Borges shave… all these stretch what you expect of a Papal autobiography.