It’s the memoir of “a complex and contradictory mind”
By Christina Deardurff
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, pictured as a young priest (in back, second from left), and his family members.
Pope Francis’ latest book has been released: a memoir entitled Hope: An Autobiography
On January 14, in time for the beginning of the Jubilee Year of Hope, Pope Francis’ latest book was released: a memoir entitled Hope: An Autobiography.
In an interview the previous month, Pope Francis had said the book was originally planned for publication following his death. “But since I’m not dying (he laughs), they’re afraid that it will lose relevance and they decided to do it now,” the Holy Father told Argentine journalist Bernarda Llorente.
Reviewers were quick to point out that there were no earth-shaking revelations in its pages.
Co-authored by Italian publisher Carlo Musso, Hope was described by Stephen White of the National Catholic Reporter as “less autobiography than it is an aggregation of already existing stories, interviews, speeches and history that are already known about the now-88-year-old pontiff.”
Nevertheless, it fleshes out, by way of anecdotes from his life — even if we have heard many of them before — some of the influences that have helped shape his occasionally startling opinions and surprising actions as Pope.
As Mike Lewis wrote on the website WherePeterIs.com, “Hope is in some ways a reflection of the wild ride Pope Francis has taken us on since his election in 2013: often unpredictable and surprising, also accessible, engaging, and never boring.”
The Princess Mafalda and Lampedusa
In its first pages, the scene is dramatically set with a description of the doomed voyage of the Princesa Mafalda, the ship (called the “Italian Titanic”) that Jorge Bergoglio’s grandparents did not board (they had purchased, but never used, their tickets) in order to emigrate to Argentina, where relatives had already settled previously.
The subsequent reports of the poor souls lost at sea, and the knowledge that there would have been no Jorge Bergoglio had his grandparents boarded that ship, have been a constant reminder to him, he says, of the vulnerable and needy migrants who cross the seas in peril of their lives.
Hence his visit to Lampedusa in 2013, which he addresses in his book:
“I felt I had to go to Lampedusa… When I heard the news of yet another shipwreck just a few weeks before, the thought kept coming back to me, like a painful thorn in my heart. The visit had not been scheduled, but I had to go. I too had been born into a family of migrants—my father and my grandparents, like so many other Italians, had left for Argentina and knew the fate of those who are left with nothing. I too could have been among the outcasts of today, so that one question is always lodged in my heart: Why them and not me?”
He also warns against a “distorted populism” which, he claims, drives some peoples in the developed world to restrict immigration of Africans and Asians. What he does not address are the phenomena of social disintegration — like the roving Muslim rape gangs currently victimizing indigenous British girls, to take just one example — that has arrived with the sudden and massive influx of migrants who do not share Western cultural or moral values.
The first phase of the rescue of passengers from the Princesa Mafalda, the ship called the “Italian Titanic.”
Lampedusa, 2013: Pope Francis lays a wreath in memory of migrants who died on their journey to Europe
The Bergoglio Family
The Bergoglio family descended from Italian immigrants to Argentina. His paternal grandparents, along with his father, Mario, came to “La Merica” in 1929 to escape Mussolini’s fascist rule, unaware, of course, that the Great Depression was about to deal them a crushing blow.
But after the financial disaster laid them low, they steadily worked their way out of the rubble to build up a small business to support their growing family.
So the Pope comes from a background of working-class people who had their share of misfortune, and he grew up amid the poverty of nearby barrios and, as a priest, also ministered to the poor. He saw much injustice, especially at the expense of the poor and working classes, which, he says, even moved his grandfather to become a political “radical.”
Later, as a bishop, he witnessed the persecution of the common people at the hands of a murderous political regime, from whose clutches he himself risked his position, his freedom, even his well-being, to help various people escape.
He has always been a friend of those who are “victims” in one way or another – victims of a capitalist system that is generally unmoored from morality, of political power that oppresses, of war and violence, of an abortion industry that he has compared to a “hitman.”
So it is perhaps natural that Jorge Bergoglio became a Jesuit; one could call it a characteristic of the modern Jesuit order, the general interpretation of the Gospel as primarily a call from God to rescue the “poor,” in whatever sense poverty occurs.
It is not an unreasonable interpretation of the Gospel, if one counts the spiritual poverty of all of us sinners. And further on in the book, he does precisely this. “Truly, we are ALL ‘the poor,’” he says, “and all in need of the saving grace Jesus brings into the world through the Church.”
It may flow from this that Francis has extended such a persistent hand of welcome to those in the embrace of the LGBT and transgender ideology.
Again, he cites here the example of his family, who, despite the customary avoidance of families in “irregular” marital situations, “were on friendly terms with everyone.”
Unfortunately, he seems to treat this “acceptance” as a basis for the statement at one point that “Homosexuality is not a crime, it is a human fact.” He says this in the context of condemning societies whose civil laws penalize harshly the practice of homosexuality.
Not grappled with is the fact that homosexuality is called in Genesis one of the “sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.” And calling it merely a “human fact” does not do justice to the ramifications, the physical, emotional and moral devastation, that active homosexuals actually suffer. All sin is a “human fact”; yet, all sin is a type of bondage from which repentance frees us, not least for our own spiritual and temporal good.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Archbishop, pictured celebrating Mass in 1998 in a poor section of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Cardinal, traveling in 2008 on the subway in Buenos Aires, Argentina
“All War Is Evil”
Jorge Bergoglio’s paternal grandfather fought in the trenches in World War I. “Nono described the horror, the pain, the fear, the absurd alienating pointlessness of the war,” recounts Francis. “But also moments of camaraderie between enemy troops….ordinary folk who communicated as best they could with signs and gestures…”
The filthy, sick and harassed soldiers in the trenches eventually found that the “enemy” were “poor wretches like themselves, with the same scared and watery gaze, sinking into the same mud, suffering the same torment.”
Who would not grow opposed to horrible and ultimately senseless wars after hearing such firsthand accounts?
“The intelligent war does not exist,” he says. He decries all war, which Our Lady at Fatima called a “punishment for sin” – and the fact that the large-scale destruction of innocent human lives is almost universally orchestrated by people who are insulated from its immediate effects.
He poignantly describes the intense suffering of the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima, as related by the then-future Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, who was present when the city was decimated by the H-bomb at the end of World War II.
Yet, in a somewhat contradictory tone, he mentions how he was moved at the sight of the thousands of white crosses at Normandy, where, he notes with approbation, “thousands of soldiers killed in just one day in the fight against Nazi atrocities.” Surely he here concedes that there is some element of the “just war” theory that is valid? Yet, a paragraph later, he says that “Anyone who makes war is evil.”
No wonder the UK’s Catholic Herald described Pope Francis as manifesting in his book his “complex and contradictory mind.”
Ostentatious Piety
Francis is nothing if not consistent in his distaste for the highly decorated, pre-Vatican II-style sacred vestments now only seen among the more traditionally-minded clergy. Those priests, he complains, are often inclined toward “clerical ostentation,” wearing “elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets…” and warns, “These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.”
Then elsewhere he confuses us by quoting Gustave Mahler, the Romantic composer, on the subject of tradition: “‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes; it is the preservation of fire.’”
“Tradition is not a museum; it’s a guarantee for the future,” Francis continues. “The idea of continually returning to ashes is the nostalgia of fundamentalists, but this must not be the true sense of the word: Tradition, instead, is a root that is essential for the tree always to bear fruit.”
You would be hard pressed to find even the most outspoken traditionalist who disagrees with that statement.
Women and a “Feminine” Church
The presence of women desired by Pope Francis, fully in the “spirit of the times,” underlines the theme of “synodality” of the Synod of 2024
Following a number of surprising appointments of women to key Vatican positions, Francis told Italian interviewer Fabio Fazio January 19 that he is appointing another woman in March, Sr. Raffaella Petrini, to head the Governatorate of Vatican City State.
Francis talks in his book about his desire to appoint more women to high positions in the Church, citing the idea that the Church is feminine because she is the “bride of Christ.” Then, however, he seems to make the leap to a resulting need for more women in positions of power, saying, “The Church is female because she is the bride. And she is the holy faithful people of God: men and women together. For this reason,identifying new methods and criteria for ensuring that women are more fully involved and play a key role in the various spheres of social and ecclesiastical life, so that their voices have an increasing weight and their authority is increasingly recognized, is a challenge that is more urgent than ever before.”
Later on, he confirms an underlying assumption that excluding women from positions of power is a form of unjust “discrimination” that the modern world is rightly leaving behind, saying that “the discrimination and professional limitation of women are a disgrace to our societies that pride themselves on being modern and developed.”
He says the Church needs to be “demasculinized,” while simultaneously admitting that “to ‘masculinize’ women would be neither human nor Christian,” and that allowing women into the clergy is not the answer. He attempts to solve the dilemma, it seems, by the promotion of women on equal footing with men everywhere — except in the ordained clergy. It may be a kind of “middle way” but it is sure to please neither feminists nor traditionalists.
Pater, Si; Magister, No?
Yet, through it all, it is difficult to doubt that Francis’ heart is “in the right place.”
He is a loyal son of the Church, but also a victim, perhaps, of the all-pervasive modernism of the 20th century, the cross of our own times.
The famed American conservative thinker William F. Buckley, a Catholic and a dissenter from Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, once said of the Church: “Mater, si. Magistra, no” — for which he was rightly criticized. Some, perhaps justifiably, apply the same formula, not to the Church as a whole, but to our current Pope: “Pater, si. Magister, no.”
And yet, Francis at his best is a teacher — when he reiterates and brings new life and emphasis to the never-changing truths of the Faith, as when he speaks on the overarching theme of this book:
“Hope is a real and tangible experience. Even secular hope… But Christian hope is infinitely more than this: It is the certainty that we are born no longer to die, that we are born for the pinnacles, to enjoy happiness. It is the awareness that God has always loved us, and will always love us, and never leaves us alone. The apostle Paul says: ‘What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? [. . .] No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us’ (Romans 8:35–37).
“Christian hope is invincible because it is not a desire. It is the certainty that we are all traveling, not toward something that we want to be there, but something that is already there.”
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