It was rather poignant that I was just finishing “Hope”, Pope Francis’ autobiography, when he passed away the day after Easter, April 21, 2025.  The only autobiography ever written by a pope, it was composed over the course of six years and was originally meant to be published after the Francis’ death.  However, it was decided to publish it earlier because of the “needs of our times and the Jubilee Year of Hope.”  That decision was a gift to readers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, as it gives a deeper understanding of just who this “People’s Pope” really was.

Francis’ autobiography reads the way his voice sounded, and while it follows a more or less linear path through his lifetime, there are significant sections in which he simply speaks from his heart about what means the most to him and why.  He spends a great deal of time initially talking about his family – when they still lived in Italy, how they arrived in Argentina, and what life was like for them once they had settled into Latin America.  One gets the sense that Francis’ childhood was like a warm embrace, centered as it was on family, friends and the God they worshipped.

It was the centrality of people that remained with Francis for the rest of his life.  He speaks often and with great humility about the priests and sisters who were such a profound influence on him, and doesn’t shy away from telling his readers about all the times he himself was less than a good friend.  Time and again, he looks for these people later in his life in order to apologize to them, healing relationships that he felt he had fallen short on.  Even as pope, it wasn’t unusual for him to stay in touch with someone “back home”, providing genuine friendship even into people’s old age.

Having lived through terrible political turmoil in Argentina from the mid 1970’s until the early 1980’s – times of torture, murder, “disappearances” and brutal suppression of dissent – Francis was acutely aware of the absolute need for peace.  “I have seen with my own eyes that war is always a road to nowhere,” he says.  “It opens no prospects, resolves nothing, turns everything to gangrene, leaves the world poorer each time than it found it.”  As pope, he would make a point of visiting those places that were most in need of a word of peace.  “Peace is possible,” he wrote.  “I will never tire of repeating it.”

He speaks of why he was an untiring advocate of the poor, the displaced, and those who have suffered greatly, especially those whose lives were so deeply marred by the clergy sex abuse scandal.  “The abusers are clearly responsible,” he wrote, “but so too is a bishop who knows and does nothing about it.  Covering it up is adding shame to shame.  Victims must know that the pope is on their side.”

But Francis himself was always a man of hope, no matter the situation he found the world in, because that is what his life and his God had taught him.  “I came to know (hope) in my family, she was my playmate as a child,” he says near the end of the book.  “I embraced her as a young boy, and I wedded her that spring that changed my life forever.  As an adult, on several dark days I lost sight of her.  I thought she had gone away and abandoned me, but it was I who had lost sight of her; and then I promised that I would follow her forever, because her heaven is already on earth.”

Well worth reading to both remember and more fully understand the 266th Pope.