The Pope’s memoir goes quiet on the most important scandal to hit the church
Pope Francis is unlike any of his predecessors – not least because he is the first to write an autobiography while still in office, writes Catherine Pepinster. But while he uses the book to admits his failings and dark times, he comes up short when discussing the abuse that has done the most damage
With just a few days to go before leaving office, President Joe Biden has made one of his last acts the awarding of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction to Pope Francis – the first time during his presidency that Biden offered it with distinction. According to the citation: “Pope Francis is unlike any who came before. Above all, he is the People’s Pope.”
That he is unlike any previous pope is undoubtedly true as the Pope’s own memoir, Hope: The Autobiography, and published today, makes clear. Even the book itself is a first: no living pope has written a such a book while in office. John XXIII’s Journal of Soul, created out of his diaries and jottings, was published after he died in 1963, while a John Paul II volume, Crossing The Threshold of Hope, was created out of his written answers to a broadcaster’s cancelled interview.
Hope is a book that combines an account of Pope Francis’ life with his musings on faith, love, poverty, migrants, women, gay people, and rows in the Catholic church between liberals and more traditionalist Catholics.
Unlike most memoirs by, say, politicians, film stars and football managers, it could not be subtitled, “I was right all along”. Francis regularly admits to mistakes and talks about dark times. But he is frustratingly light on details when it comes to what has gone wrong in his life. Fortunately, there are some big reveals too, not least about a gobsmacking big box of documents about scandals passed to him by his predecessor Pope Benedict, and how the British security services saved his life in Iraq.
But, first, what makes Francis so different from previous popes? It’s the backstory that is so fascinating. As he recounts in Hope, as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he was born in 1936 in Argentina, the child of a large migrant Italian family, who grew up with a love of football and a passion for tango (it has “backbone, strength, character, an emotional, visceral dialogue that comes from afar, from ancient roots”).
After studying chemistry, he joined the Jesuit order, and was then ordained a priest, becoming the leader, or provincial of the order at a very young age, and eventually became the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires. By the time Betgoglio was planning to retire, Pope Benedict XVI stunned the world in 2013 and announced he was resigning – the first pope to do so since the 15th century. The then Cardinal Bergoglio set off for Rome to take part in the conclave to elect Benedict’s successor – and the rest is history.
The book does not mention that Bergoglio came second in the conclave that elected Benedict XVI in 2005 but Francis suggests in Hope that he had no idea that he would be chosen by his fellow cardinals to lead the 1.4 billion members of the Roman Catholic Church, and so bought a return airline ticket and left all his belongings behind in Buenos Aires.
Perhaps he thought his time had been and gone. But we then get an account of his election, and the five ballots it took to reach the two thirds majority needed to secure election to what Catholics call the Throne of St Peter.
We read, in the Pope’s own words, how he felt as he realised that he was now pope: calm, quite sure of how he did not want the fripperies surrounding being pope. No, he did not want to wear red shoes, he would stick with his black orthopaedic ones. As to white trousers, they would make him look like an ice-cream seller, he would wear his black ones. Nor did he want the papal apartment in the apostolic palace in the Vatican. He would make do with a room in Santa Marta, the Vatican residence for guests. “I’m happy at Santa Marta because I have people around me”, he writes.
He recalls visiting Pope Benedict a few days later, and how the pope emeritus handed him a large white box. There was speculation at the time that it might contain information about various scandals but then a source told Vatican reporters that it was full of emails and other material.
But in Hope, Francis recounts that Benedict told him “Everything is in here”. Francis then writes that it contained “documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations: cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings”. But he then leaves the reader hanging with no more information about what those scandals might have been.
Among them must surely have been documents about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, at one time Archbishop of Washington, who was accused of sexual misconduct involving young seminarians and accusations were made to the Vatican about him on several occasions. Yet Francis has said that he was reportedly unaware of his misdemeanours until 2018, with McCarrick then resigning that year and was laicized in 2019. But in Hope, the Pope just mentions him in passing even though it was one of the greatest scandals in the Church of recent times.
There are other more personal stories which are not fully explained either. After being appointed provincial (regional leader) of the Argentinian Jesuits at the age of just 36, Francis later fell out with the Jesuits. Then a rather rigid, conservative man, he was “exiled” by the order’s global leadership to Argentina’s second city of Cordoba, where he could only hear confessions and not celebrate Mass at the local Jesuit church.
But after his two year “banishment” he returned to Buenos Aires a changed man, now a more flexible, understanding, compassionate individual. Quite what happened in Cordoba to effect such a huge transformation is not spelled out.
Nor is what happened to two fellow Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, who were arrested and detained for nearly five months by the Argentinian junta. Pope Francis has been accused on several occasions that he failed to do enough to help them. Here he says “I tried everything”, but he doesn’t spell out what everything consisted of.
But one gets the sense of how difficult a place Argentina has been in the past, with one of the Pope’s own teachers suffering at the hands of the junta too. He reveals that at one point he hid her collection of Marxist and other radical books in a Jesuit library.
Violence is always a worry for world leaders, of course, and security surrounding the Pope is always heavy – not least because John Paul II was lucky to survive an assassination attempt in 1981.
Francis reveals that in 2021 it was British security services who picked up on a plot to kill him during a visit to Iraq. British intelligence told Iraqi police that a woman wearing explosives was heading towards Mosul and was planning to blow herself up during the papal visit.
“A truck was heading there fast with the same intention,” he writes, later being told that both had been dealt with.
As well as highlighting the risks Francis has taken – he has gone to other dangerous places in his time – the incident reveals a significant moment of cooperation between the Vatican and the UK. Rather different to previous times – not mentioned in Hope – when, as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, he had celebrated a 13th anniversary mass to mark the end of the Falklands War.
He urged the congregation to “pray for those who have fallen, sons of the fatherland who went out to defend the fatherland, to claim as theirs what had been usurped [by the British].”
Nor does Hope mention the alarm raised by Bergoglio’s election which led to the British government sending the UK ambassador to the Holy See to visit the Pope’s secretary of state and reiterate that the Falkland Islands – or Malvinas as the Argentinian Pope called them – were British.
The message seemed to get through, although Francis is often not a diplomat. Expect some tough messages after Biden departs for Donald Trump, not least about migrants, walls and – Francis’ favourite subject – the threat to God’s creation from climate change.
Catherine Pepinster is a writer on religion and a former editor of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly
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