VATICAN CITY — In his new book Hope: The Autobiography, co-written by the Italian author Carlo Musso, Pope Francis gives a vivid and compelling account of an inspiring testimony to faith-filled hope and the power of the Rosary.

It involves the story known as the “Miracle of the Andes,” a 1972 air crash in the Andes of Argentina that was retold in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, a bestselling book by British Catholic author Piers Paul Read that was later made into a successful movie by the same name.

Just as an observer, the film had a significant impact on me when I watched it in the 1990s, then a non-Catholic in my early 20s. It was clear to me how the Rosary gave them supernatural strength that enabled them to survive and to exercise the virtues of faith, hope and charity to a superlative degree. So powerful was their witness to the faith that it was one of a number of influences that set me on the path to becoming a Catholic.

Recounting this harrowing tale of great suffering, survival and hope while touching lightly on the most gruesome elements that largely made the story famous, the Pope recalls it in some detail in his autobiography.

“I was master of the novices at Villa Barilari, in San Miguel, at the time,” Francis begins, after placing the disaster in the context of world events at that time.

“It happened one October afternoon: A charter plane heading from Montevideo to Santiago, with forty-five passengers and crew on board, including nineteen members of the rugby team from the Old Christians Club, with their families and friends, crashed as it flew over the area between Mount Sosneado and the Tinguiririca Volcano on the border between Argentina and Chile.

“Having hit the wall of the mountain, the plane lost one wing and then the other, and finally came to land on a steep snowy slope close to the Las Lágrimas glacier, at an altitude of over eleven thousand feet. In those extreme conditions, with evening temperatures dropping to -30 degrees Fahrenheit, in a climate lashed by violent storms and with so little oxygen that it was hard to breathe, the thirty-two survivors of the crash, injured and with few provisions, organized themselves in what remained of the fuselage, protected with a makeshift barrier of seats, suitcases, and pieces of wreckage, waiting for help that still did not arrive.”

“They would remain alone,” the Pope recalls, “alone in what would become their ‘society of the snow,’ to face a desperate challenge, amid great suffering, new bereavements, fraternity, mutual support, and daily prayer.”

He spares the reader details of the most well-known element of the story: that the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive, merely saying that “in an extreme and mutual pact of love,” those passengers who had died became “sustenance and hope for those who were still alive.” He also recalls Paul VI later commenting on the lawfulness of the survivors’ desperate actions.

“Two months after the accident,” Pope Francis continues, “when it was now clear that search operations had been abandoned, that no one would be arriving to save them, and only sixteen passengers were left, three of them decided to set off on an expedition that seemed almost impossible in those conditions: to scale the mountain that rose in front of them to the west, a peak of fifteen thousand feet high, behind which they thought they would find Chile.

“They left the skeleton of the aircraft, which meanwhile had been struck by avalanches that caused other victims, and equipped with no more than sleeping bags made from the cushions sewn together, a sledge made from a suitcase, two aluminium rods to use as walking sticks, and wearing three layers of clothing, they walked off into the unknown. When, despite lack of oxygen and dehydration, after days of agonizing climbing, they finally reached the top, they discovered that what awaited them was not what they had imagined but, instead, a new intricate succession of mountains and mountains, which stretched out for dozens of miles before them.”

But, the Pope writes, they “didn't surrender even then.” Rather, they “calculated together that the provisions they had brought would not be sufficient for the three of them, so one returned to the camp, sliding down on the suitcase-sledge as far as the fuselage, between ice boulders and crevasses.”

“More incredible still,” he adds, “the other two proceeded, ever more exhausted, staggering, grasping onto each other so that the two of them moved as one, until when, after another seven days, they saw first the remains of a tin can, then a cow, and finally a herdsman, who was even more incredulous than they were in front of what seemed the sight of ghosts.”

“It was salvation. For them, and for all their friends still alive after seventy-two days on the mountain,” he writes.

The Pope recalls how, in 2022, on the 50th anniversary of the disaster, one of the survivors, Gustavo Zerbino, who was 19 at the time of the crash, wrote to him on behalf of them all. “On the mountain, he [Zerbino] recalled, they had formed a united community and worked side by side according to the same values of loyalty, friendship, and solidarity that they had experienced in their families and in their parish” — a bond, Francis says, that, in those “extreme circumstances, was sealed every night with the shared recital of the Rosary.”

The Rosary’s ‘Great Comfort’

In his book, Read, who wanted to write as accurate an account as possible without embellishment or sensationalism, underscores the importance of the Rosary, and prayer in general, to the crash victims.

He describes how one of the survivors, Carlitos Paez, would lead the Rosary, beginning with the first mystery and then other survivors taking it in turns to say the succeeding ones. “Most of them believed in God and their need of Him,” Read recounts. “They found great comfort, too, in praying to the Mother of God, as if she was in a better position to understand how much they longed to return to their families.”

He added, “They sometimes said the ‘Hail Holy Queen’ thinking of themselves as the ‘poor banished children of Eve’ and the valley in which they were trapped as the ‘vale of tears.’ They were always frightened of another avalanche, especially when a storm blew outside the plane, and one night when the winds were particularly violent, they prayed a Rosary to the Virgin to protect them — and by the time they had finished, the storm had died down.”

As the suffering and threats to their survival became ever more intense, even frightened skeptics of the Rosary such as Adolfo Strauch — a fellow survivor known to them as ‘Fito’ — would eventually join in. When tremors from the nearby Tinguiririca volcano had alarmed them, the survivors thrust a Rosary into Fito’s hands.

“The skeptic was as frightened as the believers,” Read writes. “He said the Rosary with the most specific intention that they might be saved from the volcano, and by the time he had finished the decade, the rumbling had stopped.”

The book, and the film, highlight how much the survivors’ deep faith was a crucial factor in their ability to endure the extreme conditions they faced — and how their Catholic upbringing provided them with spiritual resilience to maintain hope and sanity during their ordeal.

“We had an enormous desire to survive, and faith in God,” says survivor Alvaro Magino, quoted in Read’s book. “Our group was always united. When the spirits of one went down, the rest made sure to raise them. Praying the Rosary every night strengthened the faith of all of us, and this faith helped us get through. God gave us this experience to change us. I changed. I know now that I shall be different to what I was … all thanks to God.”

“Those men and women had hoped together, drawing from the power and support of prayer and from being a team,” writes Pope Francis in Hope. “In the harshest conditions, they were witnesses and prophets of a shared hope.

“And when it all ended, even the agonizing grief of the mothers of those who didn’t return from that mountain knew, as Easter shows us, how to transcend oneself to become an example of service to others, in our deeds and our speech.”