This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The path to becoming Pope is a road travelled by only a chosen few. A small group of 266 cardinals have been elected the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism, whose devotees make up more than a sixth of the world’s population. While each man has worn an important vestment, they’re not necessarily cut from the same cloth. Each has had a unique life, experience and journey to the Vatican.

Pope Francis’s path certainly fits this description. He studied with the Jesuits, and is the first member of that order to be elected Pope. His political sympathies often veer to the Left like his childhood teachers, while his social values generally align with Church doctrine. He’s been described as an “everyman Pope” with a significant social media following and sizeable popularity among practising Catholics, political liberals and moderates. He has plenty of critics, too. 

It only seems appropriate that the Pontiff’s new book, Life: My Story Through History, would emphasize many of these qualities. The writing style is straightforward and accessible; the stories and experiences beautifully capture his thoughts, emotions and ideas. Understandably, references to his Christian faith occur throughout, but the theological discussions don’t go into alienating depth. 

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 17 December 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the man who would become Pope Francis came from humble beginnings. His father, Mario, was an accountant for a firm that dealt with industrial dyeworks, and his mother, Regina, was a housewife. Although his family had escaped fascist rule in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, they nourished certain traditions such as Italian cinema and his mother’s love of opera. This link to family, history and culture remains fundamental to Francis. 

His experiences with the Second World War could be best described as an unusual counterbalance of thoughts and emotions. “In our part of the world,” he writes, “we didn’t really grasp the sombre mood of the time, because we were far away from the places where the fate of humanity was at stake.” At the same time, “unlike many Argentinians, I knew about the war because in our house it was talked about”. He references the enormous loss of life — the “destruction” and “boys sent to the front to die” — and the fact that “war eats you up inside”.

The war also provided him with compassion for people from different walks of life. One chapter mentions friendly Polish immigrants he met as a child. They worked at his father’s company and in the community after they had “fled the war”. He believes today’s migrants, like them, “are just people looking for a better place” and can “make a big contribution to our lives”. 

There is a chapter discussing the Jewish community. His father worked with many Jews and befriended some of them. This enabled Francis to learn more about the Nazi concentration camps and, through his friend, Rabbi Abraham Skorka, speak with Holocaust survivors. “We thought it was finished when the war ended and the Nazi regime collapsed,” he writes, “but Jews continue to be stereotyped and persecuted. This is not Christian; it’s not even human. When will we understand that these are our brothers and sisters?”

Pope Francis’s political views and Jesuit- inspired principles come to prominence in some sections. We read how he received communist literature from a woman named Esther, a biochemist and head of his laboratory. “I never embraced communist ideology,” Francis states directly, “my reading of these things was on an intellectual level only.” 

After he became Pope, “some people claimed that I spoke about the poor so often because I was a communist or a Marxist myself”. From his standpoint, “talking about the poor doesn’t necessarily mean one is a communist: the poor are the flag of raw gospel and are in Jesus’s heart”. He believes that “poverty has no ideology; the Church has none either, and shouldn’t: as I say so often, it isn’t a parliament! Not everything can be reduced to factions on the right or left.”

There’s also a fascinating discussion of his views on science and human life. “We must always persevere in our search for truth, accept new scientific discoveries with humility, and not repeat the mistakes of the past: by treading a path toward the boundaries of human knowledge it is possible to achieve a true experience of the Lord, who is in a position to fill our hearts.” 

The Church’s social doctrine, including justice and human dignity, should therefore serve as “our beacon” and harm will only follow “when new technological or scientific discoveries are bent to other purposes”. This includes technological advances in warfare, creating embryos in test tubes, only to “destroy them, leading to the practice of renting out uteruses, an inhuman practice that is more and more widespread”. That’s why the Pontiff believes “we must always protect human life, from conception to death … abortion is murder, a criminal act; there is no other word for it”.

Pope Francis has other interests, too. One of the most interesting chapters is “Hand of God”, referring to Diego Maradona’s heavily disputed goal against England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-finals. When he met the Argentinian football legend years later, he jokingly asked, “So, which is the guilty hand?” 

While Maradona’s personal life was one of difficulty and personal struggle, the Pope’s respect for his playing ability is enormous. He is depicted as a “great poet” who scored goals “that were destined to go down in history, like the second one in that match, dubbed the goal of the century”. It serves as a reminder that “sports elevate, even when played in the street with a ball in tatters, as I did when I was a little boy”. 

Moreover, sports can “prevent people from losing their way and lift them up out of troubled families”; they can be used by Salesian priests to “save young people from the streets and give them an alternative to the kinds of delinquency they may encounter there”. That’s why he firmly believes in greater accessibility to sports to be played with passion and for fun, whereas the commercial aspects are perfectly fine if they’re “done in moderation and ethically”. 

Most readers will find points of agreement and disagreement in this book. Francis’s left-leaning politics are often grating; his criticism of capitalism, free markets and conservative governments is tiresome. He has raised eyebrows by supporting left-wing Latin American governments and writing an encyclical on ecology. 

Then again, you don’t have to agree with a writer to appreciate what’s been written: the fact that there’s something for everyone in this fascinating tale of a Pope’s life is both unexpected and joyful.