For fans of Conclave, there’s quite the inside story of the real thing in 2013 in the Pope’s new autobiography. We find that he arrived at the cardinals’ guest house with two cassocks and a return ticket to Buenos Aires. He was frisked, like the other cardinal electors, for phones, computers, newspapers. Someone in the queue behind him said “let’s hope he accepts”, but he was, it seems, deaf to all the signs he was in the running. An archbishop asked him, would he accept? “No cardinal can say no”, he said. He cast holding votes during the first round and assumed the ones for him were non-commital. The archbishop of Havana asked him for the text of a speech he had given earlier, and he reconstructs a few points, viz, that the Church is being called to come out of herself and go to the peripheries. That was quite the take-home message.
He got interrogated over lunch by European cardinals and then a Spanish speaking cardinal came up to ask him if he had a lung missing. Nope, he said. Just a lobe, back in 1957. “The cardinal turned red, uttered a swear word and clenched his teeth. “These last-minute manoeuvres!” he exclaimed. By which I think we can deduce that the dirty tricks department of a rival candidate had been spreading the word that poor old Bergoglio really wasn’t up to it health wise.
Didn’t work, of course, because after everyone had, yet again, knelt before the altar and placed his vote on a silver salver, he got the 77 votes that were needed for a majority vote. He was perfectly calm. And then he started to spoil everyone’s fun. No nice ring, just his old bishop’s one. No beautiful golden cross, just a nickel silver job. No scarlet shoes – the ones Pope Benedict rather liked – just his old orthopedic shoes. “I have flat feet”, he explained. And instead of sitting on a papal throne and letting everyone kiss his hand, he stands up to embrace the cardinals – pretty well give them a hug. When he goes out on the balcony he asks for the blessings of the people.
Yep, it isn’t Conclave as we like it. Francis is unambiguously male, in a Latin American sort of way. And in his stubborn insistence that he doesn’t go for all the frills and flummeries of the Vatican he rather loses the point. We like Ralph Fiennes in his regalia because it’s all rather splendid and symbolic. We don’t actually confuse the man with the trappings; they represent the job. But Pope Francis is, judging from this book, a roundhead rather than a cavalier; he says he has still got it in for the papal court and the flunkies. So, he takes one look at the absolutely magnificent papal apartments and says nope, he’s going to stay at the guest house next door with a tiny suite. (That means that no one gets to be his gatekeeper.)
It looks like we are going to be deprived of the splendid symbolism of a papal funeral when the unhappy time comes
And it looks like we are going to be deprived of the splendid symbolism of a papal funeral when the unhappy time comes: “no catafalque, no ceremony for the closure of the casket, nor the deposition of the cypress casket into a second of lead and a third of oak.” Look, I wanted to say. “It’s not about you. It’s about what it all represents.” But Francis will have none of it. But rather endearingly, he says he’s asked the Lord, when the time comes to die, “Let it happen whenever You wish but, as You know, I’m not very brave when it comes to physical pain … So, please, don’t make me suffer too much”. It’s not terribly heroic, but it’s human.
Oh and when it comes to the Two Popes scenario (that other papal film), he is keen to put the record straight; he and Benedict (the Anthony Hopkins character in the film) got on really well and there was a dramatic moment when they meet after Francis’s election when Benedict hands him over a big box, full of all the documents relating to the ghastly clerical child sex abuse: it’s now over to Francis to deal with, was the gist. (And the jury is still out about whether he has done all that he could have done to hold responsible bishops to account.)
Francis here is represented by the “co-author”, Carlo Musso, who has worked with the Pope before. And he’s terribly keen on dramatic scenarios. The preface starts off with the shipwreck of the Principessa Mafalda in 1927, bound for Brazil, which was the Italian Titanic right down to the captain instructing the orchestra to keep playing, in which hundreds of people, including refugees, lost their lives. That was the ship that the pope’s parents should have been on except they couldn’t afford the ticket when the time came. It’s why he thanks providence for his existence. Offstage, we can hear outraged secularists saying, well, what about the unfortunates who were on board and were drowned, eh? Well, he doesn’t seek to resolve the question of suffering; he just parks it before God.
There are two Francises in this narrative. There is the genuinely humble lover of peace, who is quite sincerely scandalised by the blasphemy of war and of arms trading. Quite a lot of the story of his papacy is taken up by stories of the survivors of war he has come to meet. And if your stomach isn’t turned by the wretched young girl who survived a massacre in the Congo only to be repeatedly raped by her captors, it’s stronger than his. Ditto the poor Yazidi girl who became an Islamic State sex slave. But his life as a member of the Jesuit order began with him wanting to be a missionary in Japan. And he describes the testinony of Pedro Arupe, the Jesuit at Hiroshima, who describes what happened when the atomic bomb fell. Francis is still obsessed with the horrors of that bombing; he’s one of the few public figures who seems still to care about nuclear weapons. But he goes through all the contemporary conflicts; at the outset of the war in Ukraine he offered his services to the Russian ambassador as a peacemaker.
And then there’s the other Francis, the liberal control freak
And then there’s the other Francis, the liberal control freak. One of the reasons traditionalists don’t much care for him is that he reversed his predecessor’s sensible decision to allow the old Tridentine Latin mass to be celebrated in certain circumstances; instead under him the ancient liturgy is pretty well banned. And he is unrepentant that he has given these backward-looking individuals a lesson: “it’s unhealthy for the liturgy to become an ideology”. Well, so much for his synodal listening church, then.
He is also defiant about his decision to bless gay couples and divorced and remarried couples, on the basis that it’s the individuals he’s blessing, not the relationship. As far as he is concerned, “Sexual sins are really not the most serious. They are human sins, of the flesh. The most serious, on the contrary, are the sins that dress themselves in another guise…pride.” (If it ever turns out that he himself has sinned in this respect, he’s pretty well covered.) He was also intensely moved by a meeting with transexuals in the Vatican. Which is all very well, but for people who are trying hard to remain in difficult marriages, it’s not particularly helpful to have the pope apparently validating the situation of people who leave their spouse for a better option.
As for the vexed question of female ordination, it’s not on, but he is very keen on giving women greater prominence in the governance of the Church, and indeed he already has. He says, interestingly, that for him, the Marian principle trumps the Petrine principle, which means, roughly, that Mary, the Mother of Christ, is a more important figure in the Church than St Peter, whom his authority derives from.
And he has absolutely no time for people who are hostile to migrants: “it is important to preserve the right of migration…integration is key”. Which doesn’t quite answer the question of what you do if your country – take Italy – is dealing with unassimilable numbers of people who turn up in the expectation of a home. Francis doesn’t have to deal with the hard stuff.
And yet, for all his liberal authoritarianism, the Pope who emerges from this book is an attractive figure – very well read, from Dostoyevsky to Julien Green and RH Benson, and very fond of music, especially opera – and genuinely in love with God. Which is, I suppose, what counts in a pope.
Hope, The Autobiography is £25, Penguin Viking and is out now
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist