Last week’s papal letter on immigration to the U.S. bishops captured world headlines, but it was not news that Pope Francis — who is being prayed for as he continues to be hospitalized for bilateral pneumonia — has made migration the signature issue of his pontificate. Yet the sharpness of the letter did invite consideration as to the intensity with which the Holy Father feels the plight of migrants. 

Last month, Pope Francis released Hope: The Autobiography, another in a long list of (mostly interview) books that he has published. This one was billed as an “autobiography” — claiming to be “the first ever by a sitting pope.” It was much less than that and was given a withering assessment by the Holy Father’s closest literary collaborator, British writer Austen Ivereigh.  

Yet the book does serve a modest purpose, giving an insight into how the biography of Jorge Bergoglio has shaped his papal priorities. In that sense, it is in continuity with the autobiographical writings of his two predecessors, St. John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict XVI. 

The first sign that there is something odd about Hope is the “brief note by the co-author.” Carlo Musso, whose name does not appear on the cover, writes that the “work began in 2019 and was the fruit of numerous meetings, conversations, and the study of public and private texts and documents.”  

That’s unremarkable; many prominent figures employ ghostwriters for their autobiographies, some of which are acknowledged on the cover and some not. What is curious is that the book appears to be more Musso’s work of editing and collecting rather than that of Francis’ writing. 

“Even though every effort has been made to avoid them, any errors or inaccuracies are attributable solely to myself,” Musso writes; that’s an odd thing to write in someone’s else’s book. It would seem to imply that Pope Francis did not review the final text of his own “autobiography.”  

This book, like the dozens Pope Francis has released previously, is not an autobiography but another journalistic collaboration. It is different in degree, not in kind, from the constant stream of conversations with Pope Francis that become first-person books. 

As for the “first” autobiography, just last year there was Life: My Story Through History, a collaboration with Vatican journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona, which was also billed as an autobiography. Like the Ragona autobiography, this new Musso autobiography is largely “a series of reflections on contemporary issues, with the odd anecdote from the past thrown in.” 

That’s the assessment of Ivereigh, who, noting that this Musso version begins with a strong retelling of the Pope’s childhood, wonders what happened along the six years of drafting.  

“It is as if one book was planned but cut short — did Francis baulk? — and another stitched together from existing sources: interviews, addresses, and so on, which are all in the public domain, truffleable on the Vatican website,” Ivereigh writes. “And that’s the other caveat emptor: I’d say 95 per cent of the book is rehashed public material.” 

Is it worth reading this latest in a long line of rehashes? For those who have followed Pope Francis closely for more than a decade, no. But for those needing an introduction to the man and his thinking, the Musso autobiography is serviceable.  

In 1996, Pope St. John Paul II published a short memoir for the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination, Gift and Mystery. In that, he traced out the autobiographical forces that made him into the “Be Not Afraid” Pope who had a heroic view of the priesthood.  

As a young adult, he witnessed courageous defiance of the Nazi occupation. Two days after his ordination, he offered the Holy Mass in his home parish, from which several priests had been recently martyred. He would beatify them in 1999. It is not possible to understand John Paul without the extraordinarily distinctive experience of having personally known many martyrs. 

Pope Benedict XVI did four major interview books, all with autobiographical components, as well as writing a memoir of his life before becoming archbishop of Munich, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977.  

Joseph Ratzinger himself put great weight on being born on Holy Saturday — the day of darkness, the day of silence, the day of death before the Resurrection. More than that, he saw as a young man the consequence of power triumphing over truth, as it did in the Nazi regime. He would devote his long theological life to the proper relationship of faith and reason and the need for both to be rooted in the search for truth. 

The Musso-Pope Francis autobiography gives insight into the formative experiences that explain how Pope Francis sees the world. The first is well-known to all Italian emigrants of the Holy Father’s generation. The second less so.  

The book begins with the story of the SS Principessa Mafalda, a passenger ship that set sail from Genoa, Italy, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Oct. 11, 1927. It sank.  

“That story was told in my family,” Francis recalls. “It was told in my barrio, my neighbourhood. My grandparents and their only son, Mario, the young man who would become my father, had bought their ticket for that long crossing, for that ship. … But they didn’t take it.” 

The Holy Father’s grandparents could not get their affairs in order on time, so they emigrated on a different ship at a later date. If they had been on the Mafalda, it is likely that Pope Francis would never have been born. 

“This was one of the reasons why, many years later, during my first papal journey outside the Vatican, I felt I had to go to Lampedusa, the tiny Mediterranean island that has become the outpost for hope and solidarity, but also symbolizes the contradictions and tragedy of migration and the underwater cemetery for too, too many corpses,” Francis explains.  

The plight of suffering migrants, especially those undertaking perilous travel, is not an abstract issue for Pope Francis. It is personal. He identifies them with his own father. It is not too much to say that the Holy Father believes that Providence saved his father’s life so that the son, as Pope, could “reawaken our consciences and recall our responsibilities.” 

The story of the Mafalda is deep in the memory of the Italian community in Argentina amid which Pope Francis grew up. There are other memories of his upbringing that remain with him today, for the barrio where he lived had rather a range of characters. 

“Since my childhood, I have also known the darker and more difficult side of existence, the one and the other together, in the same block,” Francis writes about how, even as a teenager, he came to learn about prisons and prostitutes. 

“There were two other girls in the neighborhood, sisters too, who worked as prostitutes,” Francis writes. “But these were high-class: They made their appointments by telephone, arranged to be collected by automobile. They were called ‘la Ciche’ and ‘la Porota,’ and the whole barrio knew them.” 

Neither John Paul or Benedict, much less Paul VI or Pius XII, grew up in neighborhoods where everyone knew who the local prostitutes were. Much later, when Pope Francis was already a bishop in Buenos Aires, la Porota got in touch. 

“You know,” she said to then-Bishop Bergoglio, “I’ve whored around everywhere, in the United States too. I made money, then fell in love with an older man, he was my lover, and when he died, my life changed. I have a pension now. I go and bathe the old men and women at old people’s homes, those who have no one to look after them. I don’t go much to Mass, and I’ve done everything with my body, but now I want to take care of the bodies that nobody cares about.” 

Pope Francis calls her a “modern-day Magdalene,” whose conversion was genuine if idiosyncratic, as her language contained “four swear words out of every five.” 

When Bergoglio became archbishop, la Porota asked him to say Mass for her and her friends. He agreed, but was told to “come early, since many of them want to confess.” 

“They were all ex-prostitutes and prostitutes,” recalls Pope Francis. “And all of them wanted to confess. It was a magnificent celebration. La Porota was happy too, almost in tears.” 

La Porota received the sacraments before she died.  

“She went well, like the tax collectors and prostitutes who enter the Kingdom of God before us (Matthew 21:31),” the Holy Father writes. “I was very fond of her. Even now, I don’t forget to pray for her on the day of her death.” 

While that experience is deeply biblical — for Jesus dined with the prostitutes and tax collectors — it is far from typical. There are likely few cardinals who have ever been at a Mass for prostitutes, former and current, hearing their confessions and offering them personal pastoral accompaniment. When Pope Francis speaks of the Church becoming itself at the messy peripheries, not the sanitized center, it is la Porota whom he has in mind. 

Regrettably, Musso’s autobiography is sloppy. We read of a “theologist” rather than “theologian” and the “Aryan” rather than Arian heresy — rather embarrassing in the year when the Church marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.  

The only hard news from Hope is the claim that, during the 2021 papal visit to Iraq, there were assassination attempts on Pope Francis that were foiled by security services. Those claims have been denied by the then governor of Nineveh province, and, as is the nature of security matters, it is not possible to know the truth. 

Hope is not what it claims to be and is less than it ought to be. But it does gives glimpses into how life in Buenos Aires shaped how Jorge Bergoglio would serve as bishop of Rome.