Pope Francis inspires hope across the globe for good reason

The contrast between the Pope’s candour and the mostly muted response from European leaders to US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s provocative 14 February speech in Munich could not have been clearer. Vance said, somewhat incredibly, that he worried more about the state of European democracies than he did about possible threats to Europe from China and Russia. 

In his letter on immigration, Pope Francis pointedly took apart the suggestion by the US vice-president, who is Catholic, that medieval Christian precepts prioritized looking after one’s family and immediate community. “The true ordo amoris (the order of love) that must be promoted,” Francis wrote, is “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

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As a new autobiography of Pope Francis published in January demonstrates, he has long been a leader who instinctively sides with those who are less well off or persecuted by the state. In what seems increasingly a world of illiberal democracies, the Pope’s message needs to be amplified. 

I have been bored by religion since my teens and remain distrustful of organized religions and their many prohibitions. Yet, paradoxically, few leaders make more sense to me than Francis. In another lesson of leadership, part of his charm is authenticity, a virtue increasingly impossible in an age of social media posts and public relations teams managing political communiques. In management speak, he walks the talk.

Hope, his new autobiography, is an occasionally disjointed memoir full of inspiring stories that have the quality of religious parables. His grandparents and father emigrated from Italy to a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. They were booked to leave on a large Italian ship that sank in 1927, a Titanic-style disaster hushed up by Italy’s fascist authorities, but changed their travel plans. One of Francis’s first trips as pope was to Lampedusa, the Italian island that receives many of those seeking asylum. 

Many overcrowded boats from Africa have sunk in trying to reach the island. During an earlier bout of pneumonia and pleurisy in 1957 amid a covid-like outbreak, Francis’s life was saved in a Syrian Lebanese hospital in Buenos Aires, as he notes in a nod to the diverse community of immigrants he grew up in.

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Francis recounts with delight a visit from a high-end sex worker who had lived in this neighbourhood when he was residing in the bishop’s palace in Buenos Aires. ‘La Parota,’ as she was nicknamed, had been left a pension by an older lover. 

She told Francis that she rarely attended Mass, but went to old people’s homes to bathe old men and women. She asked him to encourage her sister, also a former sex worker, to do something for others instead of just praying. “Her language was picturesque and imaginative, with four swear words out of every five,” Francis observes. She invited him to conduct a Mass for several sex workers. “It was a magnificent celebration,” he writes. 

It is not coincidental perhaps that someone who enjoys people so much refused the Pope’s residence, and has lived in the Vatican’s guest-house instead.

In word and deed, Francis is inherently alert to “the danger of narcissism, to be avoided with appropriate doses of self-irony.” As the Financial Times’s Henry Mance observed in his review of Hope, Francis “may be the first memoirist ever to say he wants to lower his own reputation: ‘My strongest sentiment,’ he writes, is that he has ‘a public esteem of which I am not worthy.’” The book has a chapter on the necessity of humour among religious leaders. Hope delivers: I did not expect to laugh so often reading a pope’s memoir.

While Francis has done more to discuss child sex abuse among Catholic clergy than his predecessors and pushed ahead with the disciplining of bishops from West Virginia to East Timor, his critics say he has not acted adequately against this scourge. 

There are also lingering controversies from his time as part of the senior clergy in Argentina when it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship and whether he did enough to protect two Jesuit priests who were tortured. There is evidence aplenty, however, in Hope that he often confronted the military and helped many political activists escape.

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As Yuval Noah Harari observes in Nexus, the Catholic church has long been one of the largest networks in the world. To expect one man to rid any organized religion of its dysfunctionalities is to ask for a miracle. What Francis has achieved is to encourage us to take a kinder, gentler view of minorities and the poor. 

As a gay man, I was moved by his remark to the press early in his tenure. In 2013, he responded to a question about gay priests by saying, “Who am I to judge?”

One must recall nation-builders such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, who were also blessed with irrepressible humour, genuine spirituality and sometimes necessary self-doubt, to find a parallel for Pope Francis. 

As he battled kidney failure and pneumonia, the Vatican displayed unusual transparency on his health at his request. In a conversation with a surgeon, Francis, 88, acknowledged he was at a border crossing we all must face, but remained cheerfully resolute. “He told us both doors are open,” said the surgeon.

The author is a Mint columnist and a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.