One hoped for more truth

While Pope Francis used his autobiography to admit to his failings, he came up short when discussing some of the Catholic Church’s darkest times

- Catherine Pepinster

With just a few days to go before leaving office, former president Joe Biden made one of his last acts the awarding of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction to Pope Francis the first time during his presidency that Biden offered it with distinction. According to the citation, “Pope Francis is unlike any who came before. Above all, he is the People’s Pope.”

That he was unlike any previous pope is undoubtedly true, as the Pope’s memoir, Hope: The Autobiography, published in January, made clear. Even the book itself is a first: no living pope had written such a book while in office. John XXIII’s Journal of Soul, created out of his diaries and jottings, was published after he died in 1963, while a John Paul II volume, Crossing The Threshold of Hope, was created out of his written answers to a broadcaster’s cancelled interview.

Hope is a book that combines an account of Pope Francis’ life with his musings on faith, love, poverty, migrants, women, gay people, and rows in the Catholic Church between liberals and more traditionalist Catholics.

Unlike most memoirs by, say, politicians, film stars and football managers, it could not be subtitled, “I was right all along”. Francis regularly admitted to mistakes and talked about dark times. However, he was frustratingly light on details when it came to what had gone wrong in his life. Fortunately, there were some big reveals too, not least about a gobsmacking big box of documents about scandals passed to him by his predecessor, Pope Benedict, and how the British security services saved his life in Iraq.

However, first, what made Francis so different from previous popes? It’s the backstory that is so fascinating. As he recounted in