Thursday, January 16, 2025

Not the full story – Austen Ivereigh on the Pope’s new autobiography

Because I had no contact with Pope Francis while researching and writing my biography The Great Reformer, which came out ten years ago, I was both eager for and dreading Hope: The Autobiography. This would be his own account, an opportunity to set the record straight on all those events we biographers had struggled to interpret. What if his account was very different from mine?

We did have limited contact much later, in 2018, as I was finishing my sequel,  but Wounded Shepherd was mostly about Francis’s pontificate. Nor was there a chance to go back over his life while we worked together on Let Us Dream, his spiritual guidance for a world in lockdown, in 2020. That broke new ground: not a book-length question-and-answer format of the sort John Paul II did with Vittorio Messori or Benedict XVI with Peter Seewald, it was more like a collaboration. He recorded; I drafted; he amended; I edited; he approved. The Pope’s picture is on the cover, for the content is his; he is the sole narrator. And the title page had my name under his in small letters (“in conversation with …”), while in the back I penned a “note” to explain how it was done.

Francis seemed to like this way of working, so much so that he has done it a few times since. Last year, it was Life: My Story through History “with” Fabio Marchese Ragona; and now it’s Hope: The Autobiography “with” Carlo Musso.

Confused? The publishing world certainly is. Last year’s Life, which came out simultaneously in different languages, was billed as a biography – “for the first time,” said HarperCollins, “Pope Francis tells the story of his life” – only it wasn’t. The Pope recalled where he was at particular moments in history and Ragona, a well-known vaticanista, used this conceit as a vehicle for rehashing Francis’s familiar thoughts on contemporary issues. The book was well-crafted for a mass Italian market and had some gems, but contained little that was new or surprising.

I had more hope for Hope, for it claimed to be the real deal: an actual autobiography, the first to be penned – announced Penguin Random House last year – by a pope while still pope. In his note at the end of the book, Musso says they began on it in 2019, not expecting it to be published until after Francis’ death. But the “circumstances of this moment”, Musso tells us mysteriously – Francis living too long, perhaps? – “moved” the Pope to make this 500-page “exceptional document” available now. (In truth, I understand it was the publisher who wanted it to bring out now and Francis, not much caring either way, agreed.)

It turns out that, just as Life wasn’t a biography, Hope isn’t an autobiography. I mean, sure, Francis relates in at times fascinating detail the well-trodden first 20 years of his life and family, and there’s good stuff here, portraits and anecdotes, that puts flesh on the bones of what we knew. But these are stretched out and used as a bridge – not always convincingly – to the Pope’s rehashed musings on the usual topics. After he enters the seminary aged 21 his life story is no longer narrated, and Hope becomes, like Life, a series of reflections on contemporary issues, with the odd anecdote from the past thrown in.

Musso writes that this is because “the whole period of his papacy is deeply nourished by those roots” of Bergoglio’s childhood. Well maybe, a little. But in an autobiography you’d expect to learn about what over the following fifty years has much more directly flowed into the pontificate: the Second Vatican Council and its impact on Latin America, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Romano Guardini’s polarities, the theology of the people, the Aparecida general conference of 2007, the Argentine economic and political paralysis, the 13 years as cardinal archbishop of one of the world’s great cities … one could go on. On these Hope is all but silent.

Because the narration of his childhood is first-class, I wonder what happened. Surely more of that sort of thing is what Musso was after? It is as if one book was planned but cut short – did Francis baulk? – and another stitched together from existing sources: interviews, addresses, and so on, which are all in the public domain, truffleable on the Vatican website. And that’s the other caveat emptor: I’d say 95 per cent of the book is rehashed public material.

Don’t get me wrong. To most readers it will seem fresh; and I’m good with anything that repackages Francis – the great spiritual authority of our times – for new audiences. But you’ll get why my eagerness to read Hope soon dissipated. Much of what is new in the book is too obviously not his. As Francis tells of his Italian grandfather Giovanni’s horrific experience of First World War combat in the the 78th infantry regiment, for example, we get paragraphs clearly by Musso quoting memoirs of a lieutenant in the 68th, followed by quotes from the army chief of staff, General Cordona, to illustrate his cynical brutality. This is a mistake: the reader wants to hear the subjective recollections of the Pope, not the interruptions of an historian.

As for my biographer’s anxiety: the only chapter of The Great Reformer I would need to revisit in a new edition would be its first, on his childhood, and only to add in and flesh out, rather than amend. There is a great portrait of the barrio where Bergoglio grew up, and the characters in it, including the high-class hookers La Ciche and La Porota, the second of whom came to see Bergoglio as cardinal, which led to a Mass: he tells her story with great love. I liked the description of the family – parents and five children – going to watch football at their team San Lorenzo’s stadium and on the way leaving two jars at the pizzeria, which they collected after the match filled with snails in chilli sauce. And I had never heard the shocking story of his classmate at the state chemistry school where he studied food science as a teenager: how he killed a boy next door with his father’s gun. (Bergoglio for a long time wrote to him in prison; later, after his release, the boy took his own life.)

He confirms that he was attracted to two girls as a teenager, one of whom, aged 17, he went dancing with, and was part of his circle of friends. It was them he was due to meet the day he popped into the basilica in Flores in September 1953, when he made the famous confession that gave birth to his vocation. But it is not true, as some  – not I – have suggested, that he was engaged to the girlfriend (that’s “fiction”, he says). In Wounded Shepherd, I play with the idea – there are sources – that he was planning to profess his love that day, or at least was confused about his feelings. In Hope Francis doesn’t go there (and I probably shouldn’t have), beyond saying that after the confession he didn’t meet his friends as planned, that something “big” had happened, for, like Paul en route to Damascus, he had been thrown from his horse.

It amazes me that Penguin Random House could not have found a translator and editor familiar with the papacy and Catholicism, or at least the nous and humility to ask one who was (yes, I was available) to check it over. It wasn’t the “Aparecida episcopal conference” in 2007 but the general conference of the Latin-American episcopate (CELAM) meeting at Aparecida. Rather than “the secretary-general of the Papal State”, Sister Raffaella Petrini is secretary-general of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, the papal states having disappeared in 1870. The Focolare movement is always called that, in every language; it is not “the Hearth movement”. When Francis says he comes from “a family that was radical” he means “Radical”, as in the Unión Cívica Radical. When referring to the Society as in the Society of Jesus, it should be upper-case; most of the references here (such as to a farm ”that belonged to the society”) will leave readers bewildered. And if the Italian edition translated the church of San Ignacio in Buenos Aires as Sant’Ignazio, in English it should be St Ignatius, not Sant’Ignazio. Oh and it is not the Colegio Máximo de San Miguel at Cordoba, which doesn’t have one, but the Colegio Máximo at San Miguel, outside Buenos Aires. La cultura dello scarto has long been translated into English as the “throwaway culture”, not the “culture of wastage”; religiosità popolare is popular religiosity or piety, not “popular spirituality”. And so on and on. Is it not unfair on Pope Francis to publish what is billed as his narrative when it is so riddled with these entry-level errors?

So, apart from the story of the foiled IS attempts on his life during the Iraq visit of 2022, what is new in Hope? There is a good account of the 2013 conclave, in which he recalls that immediately after he was elected he stood up and went to embrace Cardinal Scola, who, he says, “deserved that embrace”. Only he doesn’t say who the cardinal was (Archbishop of Milan, and the Italian papabile forerunner) or why he merited a hug. But he does explain why he refused the red shoes, along with the velvet mozzetta and the linen rochet – “they were not for me” – and adds the delightful story that two days later they told him he would have to wear white trousers under his cassock. “They made me laugh. I don’t want to be an ice-cream seller, I said. And I kept my own.”

And there are some good reflections on the pontificate: that the most difficult decisions have been made, for example, “after consultation and reflection, through a spirit of synodality”; and that sweeping away the court culture in the Church remains an ongoing task, in Rome and elsewhere. The Church “is and remains strong”, he thinks, but corruption and clericalism are “deep-seated problems that go back over centuries”. He rejects the pessimism of the traditionalists who see only decline: “There is no more secularisation in the Church now than in former times.” At the end of time, he says, we will not be asked if we were believers, but whether we were believable.

The little he says on synodality shows that he sees it as necessary for that credibility. He knows it won’t be easy: “There is much resistance to overcoming the image of a Church rigidly divided between leaders and subordinates, between those who teach and those who must learn, forgetting that God likes to reverse positions.” This openness to the surprises and subversions of divine action remains one of the keys to Francis, who at 88 remains energetically restless. Before giving us answers, he says, Jesus asks the one essential question: What am I looking for? “If anyone asks this question, it means they are young, even if they are eighty years old,” he says, “and if they never ask it they are old, even if they are twenty.” Perhaps that is why he believed for so long his pontificate would be short, and says he never imagined writing four encyclicals and visiting more than 60 countries. “Restless and joyous,” he says at the end. “This is how we Christians must be.”

My irritation and disappointment aside, I’ll say this: Hope is too long, but it ends well. Francis gives us urgent, heartfelt and incisive reflections on the current age, and makes a call to conversion that shines even more brightly against the darkening of our time. As he compares the lure of tech to the seductive snake Kaa in The Jungle Book, mesmerising us into a fragmented doze of indifference, he makes a Let Us Dream call for “a shared project, a collective dream”, one that bring us together as a people, and allows us to recover – as he powerfully argues in Dilexit Nos – our shared heart. Hope is not just wishing this were possible, but knowing that it is, for “when the Gospel truly exists – not a display of it, not an exploitation of it, but its concrete presence – there is always revolution: a revolution in tenderness.” If this is Francis’ last “biography”, that’s not a bad summary of the witness he has given.

Austen Ivereigh’s most recent book is First Belong to God: On Retreat with Pope Francis, with a foreword by Pope Francis (Messenger Publications).