The autobiography of Pope Francis, published today, was intended for release after his death. His decision as an alternative to bring it out at the beginning of 2025 – a “jubilee” or pilgrimage 12 months for the Catholic church – excited speculation that the 88-year-old pontiff, who moves around in a wheelchair and has had two major operations, might use the chance to retire.
That’s one story we will file within the bin.
“I’m well,” he writes in the brand new book, Hope, defying snorts of disbelief. “The reality is, quite simply, that I’m old.”
His predecessor Benedict XVI stunned the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in 2013 when he announced, inevitably in Latin, that he was calling it quits. Popes don’t try this. Only one other pope in history, of the all 260+ who’ve sat on St Peter’s throne, had retired.
If Francis had also, in view of his evident infirmity, decided to go – insiders say he “has good days and bad days” – that would have modified the Catholic church profoundly. It could have change into the brand new normal.
The reason popes are so strikingly ancient is straightforward. The conclave of cardinals which elects a pope, delivered to life within the recent film, is all the time riven with ideological disagreement. Electing a pope, like putting a justice on the US Supreme Court and even greater than that, means the church, and the cardinals, are stuck with him till he passes away.
A youngish pope – take considered one of Francis’ recently appointed cardinals, for instance, the Ukrainian-Australian Mykola Bychok, who’s a mere 44 – if elected, may very well be in place till all those that elected him were long dead. For any cardinal with an oz of worldly ambition, the prospect is unthinkable.
If Francis had gone the best way of Benedict, who finally died in 2022, it would overnight have change into thinkable. The consequent rejuvenation – bringing in, perhaps, a pope comparable in age to the church’s founder, crucified at 32 – might have been transformational.
Instead, Francis scoffs on the notion. “Each time a pope takes ailing, the winds of a conclave all the time feel as in the event that they are blowing,” he writes. “The reality is that even in the course of the days of surgery I never considered resigning.”
In his common sense fashion, he adds: “The Church is governed using the pinnacle and the center, not the legs.”
Born Jose Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 2036 to immigrant Italian parents, Francis is the primary Jesuit to be pope and the primary avowedly liberal pope – Argentina’s President Javier Millei has called him “a grimy leftist” – for the reason that death of the reforming Pope John XXIII in 1963.
Other “filthy leftists” within the church are inclined to see Francis as a disappointment: priests must still be celibate and male; gay marriage in church is as distant a prospect as ever; and on the core problems with contraception and abortion, the church stays intransigent.
Instead, he has taken baby steps down the liberal road: flirted with the concept of allowing women to be deacons – a halfway house to priesthood – before rejecting it; just a few days ago permitted gays to enter the priesthood – where they’re already present in large numbers – so long as they continue to be celibate.
But along with his common touch he has been a breath of fresh air after the German, ultra-conservative Benedict, who’s the apparent goal of some waspish comments in Hope.
Benedict was as famous for his fancy wardrobe – notably his red Gucci loafers – as his theological orthodoxy. Francis has no time for either, and regards them as connected.
“This rigidity,” he says of conservative priests, “is commonly accompanied by elegant and dear tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings… not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation. These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a private problem which may be exploited.’”
