CNN
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One of Pope Francis’ lasting reforms will be his overhaul of the papacy to embrace simplicity and humility, as evidenced by his decision to live in a Vatican guest house and carry his own briefcase around the city. papal plane.
With the publication Tuesday of a new autobiography, titled “Hope,” Francis underscores this shift with remarkable openness about his past mistakes and wrongdoings. They include, when he was young, a fight with a classmate who “even lost his mind” after hitting his head when he was thrown to the ground, and he insisted that he still commits “errors and sins” today.
For a pope whom Catholic theology considers “infallible” when teaching faith and morals, this is even more striking.
“I feel that I have a reputation that I do not deserve, a public esteem of which I am not worthy,” writes Francis, who was recently awarded the United States’ highest civilian honor by President Joe Biden. “This is without a doubt my strongest feeling.”
Although the memoir covers major events in Francis’ papacy, including the revelation that he was the victim of two assassination attempts during his visit to Iraq in 2021, it does not offer many new details about the scandals and controversies he faced during his pontificate and significant opposition. he was encountered in certain areas of the church.
Regarding the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, the pope says he felt “called to take responsibility for all the evils committed by certain priests.” Francis explained that at the start of his pontificate in 2013, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave him a large white box filled with documents “relating to the most difficult and painful situations: cases of abuse, corruption, dark affairs, wrongdoing. The pope recalls that when he was given the box, his predecessor told him “everything is there” and that “now it is up to you” to resolve the problems.
The 88-year-old pontiff also uses his memoir to address the crises facing the world today. Describing himself as having always been “politically agitated”, he repeatedly condemns the evils of war, while linking the rise of populism today to that of the 1930s and Hitler’s Germany. (Francis was born in 1936 and remembers his grandmother opposing Mussolini’s Blackshirts.)
Young people, he writes, need to know “how distorted populism is born and develops”, remembering “the German federal elections of 1932-1933 and Adolf Hitler, the former infantryman obsessed with the defeat of the First World War and by “race”. purity,” which promised Germany’s growth after a failed government.
The plight of refugees, for whom Francis has been a tireless defender, is also personal. His paternal grandparents and father had planned to sail in 1927 the Principessa Mafalda from Italy to Argentina, which sank with the loss of many lives, but ended up making a subsequent crossing. This has raised Francis’ awareness of the dangers facing today’s migrants, and he criticizes countries that produce weapons but then “refuse and turn back the refugees generated by these weapons and by these conflicts.”
Francis’ earthly humility dates back to his upbringing. In his memoirs, the first Latin American pontiff recalls growing up in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires, depicting a joyful, varied and close-knit community with people of different faiths, but a place where he also saw “the darker side.” the darkest and most difficult part of life. existence”, such as the “prison world” and prostitution.
Later, as a bishop in the Argentine capital, he ministered to prostitutes and recalls how he gave last rites to a sex worker from his childhood neighborhood, La Porota, saying that ” even now I don’t forget to pray for her on her childhood day. the day of his death. Francis’ awareness of human struggles and his own failures led him to repeatedly emphasize the importance of God’s mercy. And throughout his pontificate, he worked to welcome LGBTQ+ people, reiterating in his memoir that God “loves them (gay people) just as they are” and describing a group of transgender women who have met at the Vatican as “daughters of God!”
The new autobiography emphasizes that Francis remains a pope with a voice capable of connecting with people beyond the institution of the Catholic Church. The memoir was written over six years in collaboration with Carlo Musso, of Italian publisher Mondadori, and is published in the major languages of more than 80 countries.
This follows the publication of another Francis memoir, “Life,” last year. “Hope” was initially scheduled to be released after the pontiff’s death, but its release was brought forward to coincide with the Catholic Church’s jubilee year.
As for the future, the pope says he has not considered resigning, although it is a “possibility,” and he discusses some of his health problems in recent years. Francis says he is currently in good health and attends physiotherapy twice a week, but “the reality is simply that I am old”. He never expected to be elected pope, he said, but since that moment he has revealed his determination to stay grounded.
He explains how he eschewed the papal apartments of the Vatican’s isolated Apostolic Palace for the Casa Santa Marta guest house because he “can’t live without the people around me” and stresses the importance of keeping sense humor. This is also evident in the memoirs – for example, when the Pope explains how he was told to wear white pants, rather than black, to fit under his new white papal cassock.
“They made me laugh. I don’t want to be an ice cream seller, I said. And I kept mine,” the pope writes.
