One of Pope Francis\u2019 lasting reforms will be his reshaping of the papacy to embrace simplicity and humility, as seen in his decisions to live in a Vatican guesthouse and carry his own briefcase onto the papal plane. <\/p>\n
With the release of a new autobiography Tuesday, titled \u201cHope,\u201d Francis underlines this shift with a remarkable openness about his past mistakes and wrongdoings. They include as a young man getting into a fight with a fellow student who \u201ceven lost his senses\u201d after hitting his head when thrown to the ground, and insisting that he still commits \u201cerrors and sins\u201d today. <\/p>\n
For a pope, who Catholic theology holds is \u201cinfallible\u201d when teaching on faith and morals, it is even more striking. <\/p>\n
\u201cI feel I have a reputation I do not deserve, a public esteem of which I am not worthy,\u201d writes Francis, who was recently awarded the highest civilian honor in the United States by President Joe Biden. \u201cThis, beyond doubt, is my strongest sentiment.\u201d <\/p>\n
While the memoir covers major events in the Francis papacy, including the revelation that he faced two assassination attempts during his 2021 visit to Iraq, it does not offer many new details about the scandals and controversies he\u2019s had to address during his pontificate and the significant opposition he\u2019s encountered from some church quarters. <\/p>\n
On the Catholic Church\u2019s sexual abuse scandal, the pope says he has felt \u201ccalled to take responsibility for all the evil committed by certain priests.\u201d Francis explained that as he began his pontificate in 2013, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave him a large white box filled with documents \u201crelating to the most difficult and painful situations: cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings.\u201d The pope recalls that when he was handed the box, his predecessor said \u201ceverything is in here\u201d and that \u201cnow it\u2019s your turn\u201d to deal with the problems. <\/p>\n
The 88-year-old pontiff also uses the memoir to address the crises facing today\u2019s world. Describing himself as having always been \u201cpolitically restless,\u201d he repeatedly condemns the evils of war, while linking the rise of populism today to that of the 1930s and Hitler\u2019s Germany. (Francis was born in 1936 and recalls his grandmother standing up to Mussolini\u2019s black shirts.) <\/p>\n
Young people, he writes, need to know \u201chow a distorted populism is born and grows,\u201d recalling the \u201cGerman federal elections of 1932\u201333 and Adolf Hitler, the ex-infantryman obsessed by the defeat of World War I and about \u2018racial purity,\u2019 who had promised the growth of Germany in the wake of a government that had failed.\u201d <\/p>\n
The plight of refugees, for whom Francis has been a tireless advocate, is also personal. His paternal grandparents and father had planned to sail in 1927 on the Principessa Mafalda from Italy to Argentina, which sank with the loss of many lives, but ended up making a later crossing. It has made Francis sensitive to the dangers faced by today\u2019s migrants, and he criticizes those countries which produce weapons but then \u201crefuse and turn away the refugees who have been generated by those weapons and by those conflicts.\u201d <\/p>\n
Francis\u2019 earthy humility can be traced back to his upbringing. In the memoir, the first Latin American pontiff recalls growing up in the Flores barrio in Buenos Aires, depicting a joyful, varied and close-knit community with people from different faiths but a place where he also saw the \u201cdarker and more difficult side of existence,\u201d such as the \u201cprison world\u201d and prostitution. <\/p>\n
Later, as a bishop in the Argentine capital, he ministered to prostitutes and recalls how he gave the last rites to one sex worker from his childhood neighbourhood, La Porota, saying that \u201ceven now, I don\u2019t forget to pray for her on the day of her death.\u201d Francis\u2019 awareness of human struggles, and his own failings, has made him insist time and again on the importance of God\u2019s mercy. And throughout his pontificate, he has made efforts to welcome LGBTQ+ people, re-iterating in his memoir that God \u201cloves them (gay people) as they are\u201d and describing a group of transgender women who met him in the Vatican as \u201cdaughters of God!\u201d <\/p>\n
The new autobiography underlines that Francis remains a pope who has a voice that can connect with people beyond the institution of the Catholic Church. The memoir was written over six years in collaboration with Carlo Musso, from Italian publisher Mondadori, and is being released in major languages in over 80 countries. <\/p>\n
It follows the publication of another Francis memoir, \u201cLife,\u201d last year. \u201cHope\u201d was originally due to be published after the pontiff\u2019s death but its release has been brought forward to coincide with the Catholic Church\u2019s jubilee year. <\/p>\n
As for the future, the pope says he has not considered resigning, even though it is a \u201cpossibility,\u201d and he addresses some of his health difficulties in recent years. Francis says that he is currently in good health and has physiotherapy twice a week, but the \u201creality is, quite simply, that I am old.\u201d He expected to be elected pope, he says, but since that moment has revealed a determination to remain grounded. <\/p>\n
He explains how he shunned the papal apartments in the isolated Vatican\u2019s apostolic palace for the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse because he \u201ccannot live without people around me\u201d and insists on the importance of keeping a sense of humor. That is also evident in the memoir \u2013 for instance, when the pope explains how he was told to wear white trousers, rather than black, to go under his new white papal cassock. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey made me laugh. I don\u2019t want to be an ice cream seller, I said. And I kept my own,\u201d the pope writes. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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