In October 1927, the SS Principessa Mafalda sank off the coast of Brazil, with the loss of at least 300 lives (almost certainly the official numbers underestimated the casualties) including significant numbers of migrants from Italy and some from the Middle East. Pope Francis’s autobiographical meditations open with this dramatic tragedy – partly because his grandparents had been due to sail from Genoa to Buenos Aires on the Mafalda and had had to delay their voyage at the last minute. But the decision to begin with this story reflects a theme that runs through a great deal of the book.
Francis is keenly conscious of his roots in a history of migration and a society of very diverse cultural strands. His account of growing up in Argentina, in a family still shaped by both the politics of modern Italy and the experience of making a life in a new environment on the other side of the world, is vivid and sensitive, though we could have done with a sketch of Argentina’s 20th-century history to make full sense of the narrative. His time as the local superior of the Jesuit order and subsequently as a bishop and archbishop in Argentina involved him in complex relations with more than one violent and repressive government, and with outspoken clergy whose resistance to the government put their lives at risk. He does not go into detail about any of this here, but he does quietly set the record straight on one or two things, making it clear that, despite some harsh criticisms of his supposed failure to confront a murderous regime, he was consistently active as an advocate for political prisoners, and directly and riskily involved in helping some escape the country.
He never completely adopted the stance of the “liberation theologians” of his era, and this had something to do with the complications of his time as a Jesuit superior, with many members of the order being far more openly sympathetic to Marxist critiques of the status quo. His forte has always been practical and pastoral responses to injustices. During his papacy, he has consistently championed the rights of migrants, and there are powerful and moving pages here about his encounters with displaced groups and individuals, from Sudan and the DRC to the desperate inhabitants of the notorious camp on the island of Lesvos – “like one of the circles of Dante’s hell,” he writes.
The priority he gives to the rights and dignities of migrants is revealing – as if, coming from a context in which the migrant experience is woven into recent history in intimate and complex ways, Pope Francis is staking a claim to speak specifically with and for those who are most routinely unheard, despised and feared in the more secure cultures of North America and Europe. So much discussion of the “migrant crisis” allows no room for the voice of actual migrants; Francis sets out to contest this silencing, and uses his own family’s experience as strangers in a country full of diverse national or ethnic identities to amplify his challenge to an alternately complacent and panicky West.
It is one instance of his resolute attention to the economically vulnerable – and to the way in which the environmental crisis weighs most on those least well-resourced to meet it, as we enter an era of even more large-scale human displacement caused by ecological devastation. Francis’s encyclical of 2015, Laudato si’, addressed the environmental issue with unprecedented clarity and energy; it is enormously impressive in its ability to connect ecological questions with wider concerns about inequality and insecurity, economic injustice, and political repression. It still offers an unusually comprehensive and often theologically creative perspective on the contemporary scene, and it is likely to be one of the most durable legacies of Francis’s papacy, representing a sharp-edged Christian humanism with an unwavering focus on the claims of the least powerful and the least welcome. His approach is the antithesis to the resurgent nationalist defensiveness that is sweeping the political board in so many contexts. This book is at its best when the Pope speaks directly from his first-hand experience of contact with the vulnerable, and he has a gift for bringing these encounters vividly to life.
Francis continues to provoke what can only be called venomous responses from many of his own flock, especially in the USA: he is cast as a socialist, a globalist, a radical moral relativist and much more. He has been openly challenged – in less hysterical tones – by some senior bishops and theologians for unclarity at best and heresy at worst. He has deeply disappointed some of his “progressive” supporters as well, making positive and welcoming remarks about trans or gay people, encouraging lay voices to be heard in the Church and condemning clerical authoritarianism and then leaving the official and structural situation much as it was. He is eloquent here as he has been elsewhere about the outrages of the child abuse scandals that have shadowed the churches for so long (an Anglican reading – or writing – about this at the moment will recognise with shame many of the same failures, especially in the light of recent events in the Church of England). But there are still those who think that his response, in terms of fresh processes, has been less clear than it might have been. There have been cases where he has been slow to accept well-founded accusations – though he has acknowledged this openly and continued to work for improvement. There have, too, been moments where an unscripted and apparently casual comment from Francis has suggested some very unreconstructed views (as with an occasion last year when he was quoted as using a colloquial slur to describe homosexuals in seminaries).
Reviewing some studies of his life in these pages ten years ago, I quoted one biographer as calling him “an equal opportunities annoyer”. This is still true: it gives to this superficially spontaneous, relaxed and transparent figure a far more puzzling dimension. And this book will not do much to resolve the puzzlement. It is not, I think, that it deliberately obfuscates, and it seems in many respects to give some real insight into what touches Pope Francis personally and why. It works at the level of the Pope’s usual style of public utterance – pastoral, humane, inclusive, and manifestly emotionally committed on issues of justice for the disadvantaged.
But this takes us only so far. Francis will typically respond to issues around same-sex unions and the liberties of trans individuals, for example, with what seems a genuinely instinctive pastoral generosity; he describes the welcome he gave to a transgender group visiting the Vatican – “they left in tears, moved because I had taken their hands, had kissed them’.” Then half a page later, he will add a throwaway remark about the danger of “gender theory” that aims to “cancel differences”. He will famously say of same-sex couples, “Who am I to judge?” and then will repeat the existing official formulae and – though this has now been reversed – state that gay men are not welcome in seminaries. He has had extensive contact and co-operation with Jewish leaders, both in Argentina and as Pope, and he writes with obvious feeling about a visit to Auschwitz. He has a good deal to say about anti-Semitism and its evils. But he has more than once used in his teaching texts from Christian Scripture that have been or could be interpreted as endorsing a thoroughly and dangerously negative view of Judaism, in ways that have baffled and hurt devout Jews who do not take kindly to hearing that their faith and practice are not life-giving. An insouciant, extempore quotation from St Paul out of context can undo a great deal of positive rapprochement.
The problem is perhaps that – in contrast to his two predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II – he does not approach these questions with a strong concern for theoretical consistency. He is well known for being impatient with written texts and fond of unscripted rumination. It is a trait that endears him to his audiences: he sounds like a human being. But many situations call for honesty about where structures and disciplines are experienced as oppressive and unfair or incoherent; not everything can be resolved by personal warmth and charity.
Someone like Pope Francis may say, “You are striving to live a good Catholic life; you pray and communicate and take your turn in the food bank or whatever. But you are living in an irregular sexual union. All right, don’t panic; God loves you, and we are all sinners.” But the other person might reply, “I am indeed striving to live a good Catholic life, and I know just how much of a failure I am at it; but my decision to live as I do is taken in the context of prayer, consultation, the effort of self-knowledge, and the search for integrity. It’s not ‘but you are living in an irregular union’; it’s and. In this area of my life, I hope for more than being tolerated as a forgivable sinner. I hope for respect and support.”
The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for trans people, for remarried divorcees – perhaps even for people of other faiths, who want not simply a kindly toleration but a critical conversation that will do something to redress a history of superiority and intolerance at the theological level. The frustration Pope Francis generates in these contexts is to do with a perceived reluctance to do some of this spadework.
And it is an understandable reluctance, Lord knows. Every Christian community is bruisingly divided on such issues at the moment, and digging down to the roots of these disagreements can uncover still more divisive questions about authority, certainty and the nature of the unity that the Church can expect. The painfully messy Anglican experience in this connection is still anything but resolved. The Roman Catholic Church is in practice as deeply divided as any, but the divisions have not yet come to the point of open rupture. Ironically those who most fiercely criticise Pope Francis for his ambiguities, and who are most suspicious of his pastorally relaxed moments, are dismantling the presupposition that papal opinion has a default claim to respect. Once it is open to the same merciless scrutiny as any other opinion, with the same level of public challengeability, the traditional dynamics change significantly.
Something of the same difficulty is also noticeable the Pope’s comments on war. As with debates over immigration, he is eloquent on the intolerable human cost – and, where war is concerned, with the obscene expenditure of resources on the planning of indiscriminate slaughter. But does this mean that the entire discourse of “just war” falls to the ground? There is an ancient and reputable tradition of Christians flatly refusing to take part in war, but this has not been a majority Catholic opinion. The Pope seems to be commending an absolute pacifism; but if he isn’t, there is complicated work to be done on the limits of justifiable force. If anything, the trend of Catholic moral theology in recent years has been to look harder at these questions in the light of new concerns about the right to protect vulnerable communities worldwide. But Francis, while saying, “We do not deny the right of defence,” sidesteps details. As a lot of Ukrainians might observe, this is not an academic question; Francis’s response to the Ukrainian tragedy has been seen by many as unclear.
You can see this as a failure on the Pope’s part; or you can see it as a deeply pragmatic strategy. Francis’s emphasis on the pastoral buys him time, allowing attitudes to soften in a way that allows cumulative change: he is deliberately pitching his rhetoric at both the general and the local level, with strong, sweeping sentiments about peace, mercy and so on, symbolic gestures and personal kindnesses to individuals. Meanwhile, he is steadily building – as he openly says – a college of cardinals who represent the developing world more fully than ever before.
If the Church is not to be paralysed by self-destructive culture wars over issues such as gender, if it is to be an effective agency for international justice and stability for the sake of the most exposed and deprived, it cannot afford open warfare. Hence, despite Francis’s eloquent advocacy for “synodical” discussion, involving both people and hierarchy, he has stopped well short of sanctioning any idea that collective decision-making is on the table. Radical Catholic revisionists in places like Belgium or Germany may say what they like (up to a point); but they are not going to be allowed to force the pace for a global community.
Whether this approach is able to contain the bitter divisions in the Church remains to be seen. But what is evident in this book is a robust belief that the future is firmly in the hands of God. Francis begins by wryly thanking Providence for his grandparents’ escape from the Mafalda disaster; he ends with a rousing reminder that if we believe in such Providence “the best wine is still to come” – and also a reminder that each of us is involved in shaping the future. If we are capable of living in what he calls “tenderness” to each other, we are in tune with the divine, and so with infinite possibilities. That is what he is most eager to tell us in these tantalising, intriguing, sometimes frustrating pages.
Hope
Pope Francis
Viking, 320pp, £19.99
[See also: Lessons from the afterlife]
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