In decades to come, historians studying the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio will be confronted with two disparate trajectories of writings on the life of the Argentinian pontiff.

On the one hand, they will have to sift through a cornucopia of quasi-hagiographical memoirs, cowritten mostly by Francis with his ideological allies and schmoozers who, by odd coincidence, just happen to be progressive journalists.

Fabio Marchese Ragona’s Life: My Story through History (2023) and Austen Ivereigh’s triple eulogy The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (2014), Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (2019), and Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (2020) are samples of unblushing propaganda offering curated snippets of Francis’s life and thought.

On the other hand, historians will have to examine books like Henry Sire’s The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy with its “portrait of an authoritarian, manipulative, and politically partisan pontiff” and Philip Lawler’s Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock which records how a pope who uses “harsh rhetoric, stinging rebukes, and angry denunciations” from his pulpit, took “a perverse pleasure in shocking pious Catholics” even as a young priest.

Packed with Pious Platitudes

Last week, the Italian publisher Mondadori released what it claims is the first papal “autobiography” in history titled Hope: An Autobiography, which has been “written firsthand by the pope but with the collaboration of Italian writer Carlo Musso,” who just happens to be a former Mondadori publishing director. Mondadori, likewise, just happens to be a leftwing publisher which prides itself in promoting “‘diversity’ of every kind,” including sexual.

As with earlier panegyrics on the pope, the 320-page tome is testimony to the loquacious pontiff’s utopian ramblings on his pet topics ranging from climate change and immigration to geopolitical crises and arms control.

The book is packed with a plenitude of pious platitudes. “Anyone who makes war is evil. God is peace,” Francis pontificates, displaying little awareness of developments in Christian ethics (e.g., Oxford ethicist Nigel Biggar, who was appointed by Francis to the Pontifical Council for Life and who dismisses pacifism as “the virus of wishful thinking” in his book In Defence of War) or seeking to explain how the Allies could have defeated the evil of Nazism without waging war.

While extolling the virtue of peace, Francis reignites his long-standing war against traditionalists in the pages of his autobiography. He accuses Latin Mass Catholics of being “unhealthy” because they turn “liturgy” into “ideology.”

Diatribe Against “Backwardist” Catholics

Wondering why young people are attracted to an ancient form of worship (ironically endorsed by the Jewish virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Scottish composer James MacMillian, novelist Agatha Christie, poet W. H. Auden, and Anglican composer Benjamin Britten), Francis trashes the phenomenon from a “sociological” point of view as “backwardism.” He writes:

It is curious to see this fascination for what is not understood, for what appears somewhat hidden, and seems also at times to interest the younger generations. This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness. These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.

But, according to the The Dictator Pope, this is precisely the character flaws that Francis’s Jesuit superior-general Fr. Peter Hans Kolvenbach identified when he wrote his report advising the Roman hierarchy not to make Bergoglio a bishop. Sire records:

Father Kolvenbach accused Bergoglio of a series of defects, ranging from habitual use of vulgar language to deviousness, disobedience concealed under a mask of humility, and lack of psychological balance; with a view to his suitability as a future bishop, the report pointed out that he had been a divisive figure as provincial of his own order. It is not surprising that, on being elected pope, Francis made efforts to get his hands on the existing copies of the document, and the original filed in the official Jesuit archives in Rome has disappeared.

Happy with Homosexuals

While Francis excludes traditionalists, he is happy to include LGBTQ+ folk. “Everyone in the Church is invited, including people who are divorced, including people who are homosexual, including people who are transgender,” he emphasizes, defending his decision to permit informal blessings of same-sex couples.

LGBTQ+ people “are not ‘children of a lesser god.’ God the Father loves them with the same unconditional love, He loves them as they are, and He accompanies them in the same way that He does with all of us: being close by, merciful, and tender,” he adds. “Homosexuality is not a crime; it is a human fact.”

But there is little mention of the endemic crime of clerical sex abuse and the role of mostly homosexual priests in perpetrating abuse against altar boys and seminarians. Francis is also coy about his friend — the infamous ex-Jesuit celebrity mosaic artist Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik, accused of sexually abusing at least 25 nuns and who has yet to be disciplined.

Francis admits Pope Benedict XVI bequeathed to him a “large white box” packed with documents related to multiple scandals the Catholic church has faced. “‘Everything is in here’, he told me. ‘Documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations. Cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings.'”

Benedict told him: “I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people. Now it’s your turn.” Francis responds: “I have continued along his path.”

Protecting Sex Abusers

However, his critics — like Damian Thompson, assistant editor of The Spectator — note that if the pope were being “judged by the same criteria” as his friend Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury who was recently forced to resign over a massive sex abuse scandal, “then the Pope would have been forced to resign in 2024” for protecting and promoting high-profile clergy sex abusers.

Thompson highlights Francis’s cover-up in 2010 of Fr. Julio Grassi, a celebrity priest who ran homes for street children across Argentina. Bergoglio, a cardinal at the time, commissioned a 2,000-plus page forensic study of the legal case against the convicted priest, which concluded that Grassi was innocent and his victims were lying.

“Francis also tried to protect the Argentine predator Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta by parachuting him into a senior job in Vatican finances, and refused to supply documents demanded by the Argentine court that eventually sentenced Zanchetta to jail,” Thompson reveals.

The Dictator Pope records the “particularly notorious case” of Francis overruling the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s penalties against Fr. Mauro Inzoli, who was found guilty in 2012 of abusing boys as young as 12. In 2017, it was revealed that Francis had “quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of paedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders,” Sire adds.

Pontifical Power Grab

Bergoglio’s autobiography similarly skirts around how the pontiff climbed the greasy pole of power. In a hard-hitting interview, philosopher Jose Quarracino, nephew and godson of former Cardinal Antonio Quarracino (who appointed Bergoglio as auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires) describes Francis in his earlier roles as cruel, harsh, divisive, and power-hungry.

In 1992, the Jesuits “banished” Bergoglio to Cordoba to keep him away from Buenos Aires, where he had served as provincial for several years. The end of his term was marked by great internal divisions between his friends and opponents, the philosopher recounts. Fr. Ismael Quiles, who was one of Bergoglio’s teachers in the Society of Jesus, interceded with Cardinal Quarracino to “rescue him from his exile.”

“Bergoglio was very badly off spiritually and psychologically at the time. That’s why my uncle asked the Holy See for him to be an auxiliary bishop — even though there were already others,” Quarracino recalls. Bergoglio got on very well with his archbishop and managed to “stand out” from the four or five other auxiliary bishops and rose to the rank of coadjutor bishop with the right of succession — thus immediately becoming archbishop after Quarracino’s death.

Upon assuming power, the new archbishop made radical changes in the power structures of the archdiocese, ridding himself of his predecessor’s most important collaborators like the saintly Msgr. Jose Erro, rector of the Buenos Aires Cathedral, “whom he told by phone to resign and retire — without consideration, without thanks,” the philosopher recounts.

“Many were shocked that Bergoglio as archbishop almost always put on a sullen, bitter, sad face, a ‘vinegar face'” especially during liturgical celebrations, he adds. Contrast this recollection with the pope’s autobiographical self-adulation: As a young teacher teaching creative writing, Francis writes, his students nicknamed him “Carucha” or “Babyface.”

“An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally,” the Trinidadian-born British writer novelist V. S. Naipaul quipped. Funnily, a day after Hope was released, the pope’s most prolific hagiographer, Austen Ivereigh, slammed it for being “long-winded, riddled with errors and revealing little that has not been previously published.”

I don’t envy future papal historians their task of weighing how much of Hope is fact and how much is fiction.

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.

The post Pope Francis’s Autobiography Is a Masterpiece of Self-Promotion and Obfuscation appeared first on The Stream.



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