It seems hard to believe that just a few short popes ago (and in the centuries preceding) no one, including Catholics, had any real connection with the human running things from the throne of Saint Peter in Rome.
Catholics didn’t define themselves like many do today — especially in polarized America — by their affinity to the pope.
No one has done more to make real the face of the papacy than Argentine priest Jorge Mario Bergoglio, otherwise known as Pope Francis. He approves apps that offer his sayings in quippy form, gives chatty interviews, and is known for eschewing fancy homes and clothing. Instead, he takes public transportation, wears clunky orthotic shoes, and says such things as “I am a sinner — that’s not a figure of speech” and, of gay people, “Who am I to judge?”
This radical approachability has become a hallmark since Francis took office in 2013, redrawing the face of the 1.4 billion-person Catholic Church. Many people have loved and been profoundly moved by this change, seeing Francis as a symbol of an outward-looking church focused on accessibility, intimate connection and inclusivity. Many others oppose his frequent blurring of lines, saying he’s harming the church by making the papacy smaller.
In two new books, Francis takes concrete steps toward setting this everyman-pope in stone for literary history. Through “Life,” which will publish Tuesday and is described as his first crack at autobiography, and a second book, called “A Good Life: 15 Essential Habits for Living With Hope and Joy,” the 87-year-old is making it really official: The pope is just a guy.
He’s a guy who is hovering in the late stage of his life. Considering his age and health challenges, and that his predecessor retired, who will succeed Francis is already a topic of speculation among Catholics. In “Life,” Francis says he believes the pope’s ministry is for life and, thus, he would retire only in the case of “a serious physical impediment.” For me, as someone who reports on religion, the book’s informal and accessible style is part of why it’s challenging to picture the next pope being more remote.
“Life: My Story Through History” is a chronicle of Francis’s life organized through major world events, from World War II and Argentina’s Dirty War to the 9/11 attacks and the coronavirus pandemic. It intersperses Francis’s words with those of his co-author, Italian journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona, setting rich scenes of the pontiff’s daily life with his description of how he experienced those periods, with whom and how he reflects on them now.
The publisher says the book is aimed at young people in particular, and it shows. The structure is simple, as is the language. Also, it has an almost wow-I-can’t-believe-this-is-my-life vibe as Francis looks back on everything he has been through and pulls from it repeated core lessons.
For the most part, he presents these lessons in a secular, universal way. That’s not to say he doesn’t communicate his theology and faith. Through the book, he frequently speaks of the role of the church, prayer and his feeling of God’s presence. But there is also a thread woven through the book: I am like you, and the Catholic Church isn’t about the trappings you see. And as Francis tries, in his final era as pope, to shift the direction of the church, perhaps this book is trying — in a different way — to say something more like what you expect from a pope: God is like you, and the Catholic Church isn’t about the trappings you see.
Francis describes one of the most famous visual moments of his papacy, at the start of the pandemic, when he stood in a hauntingly empty St. Peter’s Square in the rain to deliver a blessing.
“Many have wondered what I was thinking about … it was nothing remarkable; I was just thinking about people’s loneliness. I was alone, and many people were living in the same situation as me,” he writes.
One of his lessons is that all living things are interconnected, no matter how far away we are from one another. He drives that home through his own experience, as the terrified child Bergoglio, watching scared adults around him during World War II, even as the fighting was taking place in a distant country, and later, as the Buenos Aires archbishop, immediately going into prayer when planes slammed into the World Trade Center.
Another central lesson in the book is that the most important thing we can do to lessen suffering is to eradicate hate and resentment inside ourselves. Many of his chapters are organized around products of war and hate: the Holocaust, the U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, political division and violence during the pandemic. The book was created, its jacket says, so young people could hear an older person “reflect on what our planet has lived through, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past.”
It’s not clear that the stories or core characters in “Life” will be new to people who have read the detailed interviews Francis has given to European journalists, or biographies of him. There are familiar characters, including his Grandma Rosa, who taught him about prayer as well as political activism, as she helped defend the church against the rise of fascism in Argentina. There’s his former teacher Esther, a biochemist who was also an atheist Marxist activist and who became a close friend before she was tortured and murdered by the military regime during the Dirty War.
The world is seen through the eyes of this sincere first-person narrator, who expresses real vulnerability and sadness watching immigrants like his parents yearn for home (in their case, Italy), who tangos with his friends and falls for a girl, and who, during the 2013 conclave that elects him, is terrified to enter the room where people are voting because he’s scared he won. Francis had booked the tightest flight itinerary available because he didn’t like Rome and planned to hustle home.
The second new book, “A Good Life: 15 Essential Habits for Living With Hope and Joy,” published last month, reinforces the image of Francis as everyman. The book is part of a genre of Francis guidance that comes bite-sized. One could put it in the category of the snappy, often God-free tweets he posts to his 55 million-plus followers on the X platform, and previous books with such titles as “Pope Francis Talks to Couples” and “Happiness in This Life: A Passionate Meditation on Earthly Existence.”
These titles are a stark contrast to some of the books of Pope Benedict XVI — “Spirit of the Liturgy” and “Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine” — and Pope John Paul II’s books, mostly official papal teachings, such as “On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason” or “On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering.”
“Pope Benedict was a theologian and wrote like one. Pope John Paul was a philosopher and wrote like one. Pope Francis is neither,” the Rev. Mark-David Janus, president and publisher of the Catholic publishing house Paulist Press, which has published more than a dozen books by Francis, told The Washington Post. “He’s a pastor, so he writes as a pastor.”
Indeed, the legacy Francis leaves in books like these isn’t a radically different theology than that of his predecessors but a radically different emphasis and style. “A Good Life” interests itself in pragmatic, basic ways to improve yourself — Catholic or not. Cry more. Shut off your phone and look in the eyes of the people to whom you’re talking. Don’t be a couch potato.
This is the kind of advice you might expect from a wellness podcast, your Peloton teacher or even Joel Osteen. Popes have been expected to be above that kind of crowd, the elevated embodiment of a truth that is allowed — in love, they’d say — to be judgmental and exclusionary. Francis has used his stature to emphasize different truths in a different way.
Life
My Story Through History
By Pope Francis with Fabio Marchese Ragona. Translated from Italian by Aubrey Botsford
Harper One. 240 pp. $28.99
A Good Life
15 Habits for Living With Hope and Joy
By Pope Francis
Worthy Books. 208 pp. $28
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