It was inevitable that books about Pope Francis, the most intriguing man to lead (or, as he himself would say, to serve) the Catholic Church in many a decade, if not century, would become something of a cottage industry. But if you're intent on reading a biography of the man, not a hagiography but an honest, no-holds-barred account of what makes Jorge Mario Bergoglio-turned-Pope-Francis tick, then Paul Vallely's Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism is, beyond a doubt, the one you want to have.
Paul Vallely is an award-winning British journalist internationally known as a commentator on religion, society, and ethics. In order to write this book he has left no stone unturned, conducted prodigious research and probing interviews with persons who have known Jorge Mario Bergoglio from as far back in his life as it was possible to go. The result is an in-depth, indeed one could say warts-and-all portrait of the complex Argentinian churchman who became the first pope from Latin America.
Many readers will be surprised to learn that this loving, smiling pope has a past as a conservative within the church and a divisive figure within his religious order, the Society of Jesus. Appointed as Provincial of the Argentine Jesuits at the young age of 36, a position in which he served between 1973 and 1979, he had to hit the ground running and learn on the job. Inevitably, he made mistakes for which he later came to feel remorse. This was the era in which Liberation Theology was on the rise and in which Vatican counter-attacks on it began, and Fr. Bergoglio was suspicious of it. Not that he was indifferent to the plight of the poor -- far from it; but his notion of how to help them took the traditional road of charity rather than the in-the-trenches approach of empowerment that he later came to espouse. At the time, two of his priests actually moved into the slums to work with the people, and Bergoglio pulled them out, insisted that they leave this "close-up" work.
But Vallely's account is balanced and nuanced, not a "bad Bergoglio -- good Pope Francis" book. He sets an event like this in its context and explains how the young Provincial, responsible for the lives and welfare of his priests, feared for the safety of his two confreres; it wasn't a matter of indifference to the situation of the slum dwellers, but an awareness of the grave danger in which workers for the poor and oppressed were putting themselves. Indeed, readers will be intrigued to learn how many of Pope Francis's concerns today have roots in his experiences in his post-conversion ministry among the poor.
And what was the conversion that Bergoglio experienced? Tension between conservatives and progressives among the Latin American Jesuits had reached the point where his superiors thought it best to send him away for a while. In 1986 he visited Germany to do research for a doctorate; he began investigating the life and work of Msgr. Romano Guardini, a philosopher and religious writer who had considerable influence on him (he cities him several times in his encyclical Laudato Si). The project was eventually abandoned (a matter of personal regret to me, I must admit). In 1990 he was "exiled" for two years to the Jesuit community in Cordoba, and here Bergoglio's time away from clerical, pastoral, and administrative pressures gave him the mental and spiritual space to think and reflect on his life. He became aware of, and contrite for, his perceived mistakes and returned a different man. Here can be seen the beginnings of the pope who espouses mercy above all and who calls himself a sinner. Pope Francis is probably the last person who would want to be called a saint, and yet Vallely's portrayal of him conjures up that definition of a saint as "a sinner who knows s/he has been forgiven."
Even Francis's less popular positions are explained rather than justified: his apparent slowness to act decisively on women's issues, for example, set in the context of his Latin American upbringing. (Yet, the irony cannot be missed that his position on where the Church should be going -- focus on Social Justice, not on what he himself has termed "below the belt" issues such as abortion -- is very close indeed to that espoused by the much-maligned LCWR.) But he is undeniably courageous, especially in his going head-to-head with the endemic corruption in the Vatican Bank and the Curia and his confronting of that perversion of religion otherwise known as the mafia. He may be exasperating to those who are more comfortable with being able to pigeonhole someone, but undeniably he has brought the first real breath of fresh air to the Church since Good Pope John XXIII "opened the windows" more than 50 years ago. While he has never explicitly criticized the two oppressive papal regimes that immediately preceded him, his actions speak for him: he aims to return the church to its founder's ideals of service -- "Those who wish to be great among you must be servants" -- and of concern for the poor.
