Pope Francis's memoir illustrates the 'messy' challenges he faced and the contradictions of being human

In the first chapter of his autobiography, “Hope,” Pope Francis served readers a reminder that his passionate defence of migrants and refugees originated in deeply personal as well as theological roots. Although he is hailed as the first Argentinian pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, his extended family emigrated to the South American country from the Calabria region of Italy in 1922, only 16 years before the future pope’s birth on Dec. 17, 1936. Francis devoted the opening of his life story to that migrant’s tale. In doing so, he brought attention to the twist of fate that made his own existence possible. His grandparents, along with their son Mario, had their hopes of sailing to South America on the SS Principessa Mafalda in October 1927 dashed. Between Italy and Argentina, the Mafalda went down at sea with a loss of between 300 and 600 lives. “That shipwreck was the Italian Titanic. (The) story was told in my family. It was told in my barrio, my neighbourhood. It was sung about in the popular songs of migrants on both sides of the ocean,” Francis writes in “Hope,” his autobiography that was released in January. Had the son Mario and his immigrant parents been among the victims, later memorialized in story and song, there would have been no Jorge Mario Bergolio to be chosen by the conclave of Cardinals in 2013 as Pope Francis, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. “That is why I’m here now. You cannot imagine how many times I have found myself thanking Divine Providence,” Francis wrote in “Hope.” The metaphor of the shipwreck narrowly avoided and bad luck begetting greater good fortune clearly extended beyond Francis, himself. The Barque of St. Peter, an out-of-fashion seafaring term for the world’s largest Christian denomination and its 1.3 billion adherents, is now seen in various states of repair. One is that it’s making a vital course correction. Another is that it’s becalmed and running low on provisions. A third has it listing dangerously to the port side. The debate over the metaphor intensified on Feb. 14 when Francis was hospitalized in Rome with double pneumonia. The implication of an 88-year-old human being bedridden and unable to breathe properly was obvious cause for concern. The usual Vatican fog that described the condition as “complex” only fed death watch fever. “It’s pure reason that the older you get, each time you go into hospital with a major illness, the less likely you’re going to come out,” said Luke Stocking, interim director of the major Canadian Catholic social justice agency Development and Peace. Stocking is among the Catholics called to assess Francis’s legacy. He believes history will judge it positively overall. Critics might target a papal penchant for “messiness” or for certain “symbolic gestures” that tended to lead nowhere, appeared as grandstanding, or entirely backfired, he acknowledged. “But those things speak to me, and to a lot of us, within Development and Peace and the wider Church, as showing simplicity, closeness, a more pastoral way of being the Church. The point Francis always makes is that it’s about the mission of announcing the Gospel. His vision of the Church is the people of God walking together, and I think that’s most important.” He notes the environmentally oriented 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ brought secular attention to the Church until secularists realized Francis meant an understanding of “nature” far beyond tree-hugging, shrub-cuddling, or being BFFs with Bambi. For the faithful, it and other encyclicals of the Francis era brought refreshed, contemporary vocabulary to traditional understanding of “the interconnectedness and indivisibility of our relationship to the Earth, to God and to each other,” Stocking said. That interconnection, he agreed, has been integral to Francis’s reawakening of the Christian conviction amid the choice between ideas and humans, when we should always choose the human. “Sometimes choosing humans over ideas can lead to messiness, but at the core of our faith is a person, not an idea. Jesus is not an idea. The Incarnation is a person.” Gerry Turcotte, president of St. Mark’s and Corpus Christi College on the UBC campus in Vancouver, says Francis has had such a powerful impact on young people because of his ability to unite profound theology with common understanding. “Being president of a Catholic university throughout his papacy has allowed me a particular view of the Pope’s way of connecting with younger people, of making them feel valued in the faith, and knowing the Church wants to hear their voice,” Turcotte said. But while he lauds Francis for his outreach to other faiths as well, Turcotte suggested it’s too early to judge the Pope in terms of measuring what he has accomplished against the hope he generated at the conclave a dozen years ago. “For ultra conservative Catholics, he was too radical. For liberal Catholics, (he) was not going far enough. The reality is he aimed to be a balancing force and, above all, a connector. In the end, I believe we’ll come to see Pope Francis was more of a traditionalist than he is given credit for.” McGill University’s Douglas Farrow, a professor of theology and ethics, as well as a holder of the Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies, agrees that one of Francis’s legacies will be divided loyalties. But he isn’t convinced that will be the faithful’s fault for misunderstanding the Franciscan papacy. Rather, Farrow said, it’s integral to the Pope’s nature. “He is a man of contradictions. He came in (to the papacy) saying to young people ‘go and make a mess.’ He’s leaving as an old man who has followed his own advice and made a mess. Even his parting gift of an enormously large college of Cardinals is likely to be quite a mess when it meets (to choose the next pope),” Farrow said. He disputed a common claim that the problem lies in Francis’s weakness as a theologian or, as one senior Canadian cleric said to me privately: “You know, he’s an idiot. Well, not so much an idiot as a Jesuit. They like to make a mess.” Farrow believes that judgment ultimately underestimates Francis’s intentionality. “It’s not like he (was) bumbling around. He (had) a pretty shrewd mind. He (had) his own quite idiosyncratic understanding of theology, the human person, and the Church — and he messed with other people’s understanding of all those. But (was) his own (understanding) actually coherent? I don’t think so.” Like a ship’s captain stranded between two shores, Francis’s theology was “incompatible at key points” with the tradition of the Church: “Therefore, it’s inevitably incoherent because he’s sitting in the chair that is responsible to maintain that tradition,” Farrow said. Farrow stressed he is not at all suggesting, as some die-hard, self-styled traditionalist Catholic conspiracy theorists insist, that Francis set out to deliberately wreck the Barque of Peter on the reefs of liberal secularism or any other such political category. “What he (did) is take an idiosyncratic, and even autocratic, approach to his own function as Pope, and used it to undermine the authority of (Catholic) tradition, the authority of other bishops, and left us asking ‘Does this man really know what he’s doing?’ Ultimately, that’s a Divine judgment. But you can’t have it both ways.” And yet Francis’s own autobiography illustrates that in some ways you can. His family, unable to leave, were saved to finally arrive in the land where a future Pope was born.

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