Hope, The Autobiography is billed as the first ever biography to be published by a serving pope, but it reminds me of the last book on Francis I read, based on interviews with the journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona: My Story Through History. We get some of the same accounts of his early life, his novitiate with the Jesuits, the junta, his admiration for Pedro Arrupe – the former Superior General of the Jesuits who was working in Hiroshima when the bomb landed – his election to the papacy, his love of music, his wide reading.
This biography was intended to be published after the Pope’s death, but that day seems happily distant, so it serves as an update of his views. Hope has a cobbled-together feel about it, as if Carlo Musso, the Pope’s “co-author” had stitched together a few passages on Francis’s latest initiatives to get it out in time for the Jubilee Year of Hope.
Left to himself, Musso has a taste for dramatic narrative; the prologue is about the sinking of the Italian equivalent of the Titanic in 1927, the Principessa Mafalda, which went down in dramatic style, with the orchestra playing, refugees in the hold and the sound of gunshots as the officers took the quick way out. This was the voyage that Francis’s parents did not take to Argentina, because they didn’t have the money for the fare. “You cannot imagine how many times I have found myself thanking Divine Providence,” he concludes.
We learn about Francis’s childhood, his time in technical school (and the violent fate of two of his classmates), his attraction to girls, his Jesuit vocation. There’s a lot about his consistent initiatives against war and weapons, and this aspect is moving. Occasionally there are surprises: he didn’t have a party after his ordination because that wasn’t his style; instead there were just a couple of bottles of orangeade for his thirsty relatives.
But then he didn’t want a fuss after his election to the papacy either. This account doesn’t exactly summon up Conclave, the film. So, no scarlet slippers (he wears orthopaedic shoes), no flummery and no white trousers (he wasn’t going to look like an ice-cream seller, he said indignantly). And no lovely papal apartments either. Inspiration struck when he saw the modest little suite being prepared for the Patriarch of Constantinople at the Casa Santa Marta and he moved in, to be with people. It was a shrewd move; those who control access to the papal apartment control the pope; in a guest house, that’s less possible.
His funeral is going to be pared down, too. He’ll be buried at Santa Maria Maggiore, and there’s going to be none of the resonant symbolism normal for popes: “no catafalque, no ceremony for the closure of the casket, nor the deposition of the cypress casket into a second of lead and a third of oak”. You wish someone would tell him: “It’s not about you… the symbolism is designed to tell us something about the history of these things and the nature of death.”
He tells us that “the Bishop of Rome is a pastor”, but if I were a Roman I should feel a little short-changed; he says that as pope he has had time to visit very few of the churches of Rome. Yet that’s the job of a bishop, no? Reading this book to try to understand Francis’s conception of the papacy there is indeed mention of his synodality initiative as a way for the Church to listen to its own parts, but there’s not much sense of collegiality with his brother bishops, though he may take that as read. This is an autobiography, not an analysis of his role, but there’s even less here of John Henry Newman’s sense of the papacy as the final court of appeal against error, a negative role.
Much of the interest of the book is how Francis is handling the criticism of his initiatives; the the answer is, combatively. He is defensive about Fiducia Supplicans, the declaration about the blessing of people in irregular situations, notably homosexual couples and the divorced- and-remarried, which almost capsized Rome’s relationship with the Orthodox churches. “It is the people who are blessed, not the relationships,” he says. Except that you do have to foresee how these things look, especially if they’re done in church. For those who are struggling in difficult marriages, a blessing for the divorced-and-remarried doesn’t look like an affirmation of their efforts.
Francis is positive about his outreach to transsexuals, and fair enough, but it has limits: “Any ideological colonisation is extremely dangerous,” he observes, “such as gender theory which seeks to cancel differences on the pretext of making everyone equal. In the same way any practice that turns human life – which is at every stage, a gift and an inalienable right – into a contractual object or illicit trade is unacceptable.” So he gives short shrift to surrogate motherhood because it exploits poor women, and good for him. He is also very much against euthanasia – and interestingly refers to RH Benson’s dystopian novel The Lord of the World as an instance of euthanasia becoming the equivalent of extreme unction. So, there are clear limits to his liberalism.
The same goes for women’s ordination. Rather brilliantly he argues against it on the basis that this aggravates the problem of “clericalism”. Instead, he wants to see women given more power within the Church, which he is already doing. He articulates an interesting principle: “The Church is female – it is not male” (based on St Paul), and it must, he says, be “demasculinised”.
“It is not a question of co-opting all women into the clergy… of enhancing the Marian principle, so that it is even more important in the Church than the Petrine principle. Mary is more important than Peter, and the mystical nature of the woman is greater than the ministry.” It sounds like the elevation of women even over the papacy, but it also sees off the claim of women to ordained ministry.
That will cheer up traditionalists, but they will be less happy with his intransigence on the question of the Traditional Latin Mas. He’s sticking with the de facto ban on the celebration of the Tridentine Rite (it’s only the unsympathetic Dicastery for Divine Worship which can grant permission), thereby overturning the sensible compromise of his predecessor, on the basis that “it is unhealthy for the liturgy to become ideology”.
The celebration of Mass in the form in which it was celebrated for half a millennium is hardly ideology, but the Pope is having none of it. “This rigidity [of those spiritually attached to the rite] is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation… These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties…”.
That’s quite the charge sheet, coming close to conflating a love of the Old Mass with psychosexual disorder. He doesn’t say that only camp homosexuals like the Tridentine Rite, but he comes close to equating liturgical conservatism with effeminacy. He quotes with approval a US cardinal who, when approached by two newly-ordained priests for permission to celebrate Mass in Latin, tells them to learn Vietnamese and Spanish before they learn Latin, on the basis that these languages are spoken in the diocese. Bishops like that don’t deserve vocations.
What this book does is remind us yet again that Francis is a complex
man, simultaneously compassionate and authoritarian. And although
there’s a resignation letter with the papal chamberlain in the event of
him suffering a medical impediment, he has never thought of resigning.
At the age of 88, he’s still going strong – and that’s impressive.