Hope: a review

Can you get to know the character of an author in his or her work? You never get a full reveal, but here we have a book by a man prepared to admit his faults  which, to be honest, are not many.  if I were to say that Hope is a good book according to the accepted canons of writing I would be speaking truthfully, for it is written in a lucid style that makes for easy, yet informative reading. As a writer I value the book for its conciseness and lucidity. The style is selected to make the book easily accessible to ordinary readers, making it  far from the abstruse prose of some Vatican documents and much nearer to the clarity of writing found in the works of Benedict the Sixteenfh .Francis' predecessor.

So the book is good in the literary sense, but there is a deeper sense that it has a claim to be a good book. If you pause a moment and reflect on the word good you will discern that it has differences of meaning. A good meal is one sense, but sometimes when we ponder on goodness of character we get intimations of a depth of goodness that is profound, and when reading Hope I got at times a sense, an inkling,  that I was being addressed by a person of deep moral and spiritual goodness.

Francis' writes about people in his family both in Italy and Argentina, and tackles the plight of migrants with a fervour of one who recognizes that he is from immigrant  stock on both paternal and maternal lines. His immigrant ancestry makes him committed to the needs of migrants, a significant issue in the modern world. He seems to be open on the subject of women priests, but on matters that could ignite fissile, schmismatic  elements in church life popes, tasked with preserving the unity of the church, walk carefully on eggshells.

The book makes much of Francis' commitment to the alleviation of poverty. His family long had socialist leanings, and so he was early on committed to supporting President Peron. Francis speaks fondly of Peron and was a convinced opponent of the right wing regime that overthrew Peronism, to establish a society that served the rich. Francis enriches his work with powerful experiences. For example, while doing a walking retreat, which concludes the Jesuit novitiate, he found himself in Chile and encountered impoverished children who had no shoes. This deep poverty impacted strongly on him. The book tells of the work he and his fellow Jesuits performed in the barrios of Argentina, and he does not ignore the work of Catholic nuns, who labour  hard for the poor and the sick. Francis tends to downplay his own successes, preferring to give credit to others, and he includes in his book celebratory passages which extol the work of women in the church. 

Francis hates war of any kind, and, as he is a Jesuit, a member of the religious order , some of whom were missionaries in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped, he has had the privilege of talking with the survivors and listening to their gruesome accounts of this monstrous blight that befell the city in 1945. He has visited that city as part of his papal visitations, and in this book he  spends time attacking nuclear weapons. He is well-informed about other conflicts and the book is therefore able to address conflicts such as Gaza and others.

The pontiff addresses a key point that  women and children do not cause wars, but that they are disproportionately represented among their victims. War, says Francis, is a linguistically feminine noun in many languages, but never has a woman's face, implying that war is male initiated. 

But Francis has a serious issue with oppressive regimes throughout the world, one of which he personally was forced to endure for years in his homeland, Argentina, when the military junta took over the government, utterly illegally, and ran a fully Fascist regime that oppressed the ordinary people and had a grim record of murder and torture. The Junta persecuted those who worked for the alleviation of poverty.  Francis, himself, at times smuggled escapees from the regime  by hiding them in his car as he drove out of Argentina. He adds power to his work by detailing the stories of people who underwent persecution, sometimes involving death at the hands of the regime. He writes about the disappearances that have never been solved. He tells us about nuns being drugged and thrown out of an aircraft over the Atlantic.

One piece of information that did not get into the news in Britain is that survivors report that in some instances the rooms in which the atrocities were going on were sometimes adorned with pictures of Adolph Hitler. This demonstrates to readers the source of the Junta's inspiration. 

The Pope has scathing words to describe the hypocrisy that passes for peace in modern society. Peace in much modern parlance is a mere lull in hostilities. Francis takes the Christian line that peace arises from converted hearts and minds and restored relationships. He argues that a ban on weapons production for a year could see the elimination of hunger. Idealistic, yes, but true.

He links his opposition to war with his advocacy of responsibility for the environment, damage to which is responsible for much human suffering and which if unaddressed will become worse. This follows on from his papal encyclical, Laudato Sii, on the matter. An encyclical is a letter addressed to the church and the world on an important matter.

In detailing some of his early life Francis reveals something of his own calling to the priesthood.Every call is individual and Francis at first did not feel called. Initially, he began to feel that he was being urged to the priesthood,  which did not go away. But the pressure grew to the day when he felt that he was gently, but firmly being pushed to enter a church. He yielded and met a priest who heard his confession, though he told no one about his feelings until there was time to him to reflect, firstly he thought of joining the diocesan clergy in his native diocese, but then discerned that he was called to the Jesuits, a scholarly and well-disciplined order. His parents were divided, with his father more amenable than his mother, but she eventually went along with his decision.

He quickly had promotion in the order  being elected to the position of head of the Argentine Jesuits very quickly, testimony to his qualities and leadership powers, and he ascended to the rank of archbishop later on. This entailed dropping the position of Jesuit superior, but brought him into tensions with the regime, but these finished when the British task force defeated the Argentinian Junta in 1982. From then he could practise his ministry more safely. There had been some support for Francis at the conclave that elected Benedict the Sixteenth, but Francis did not think of himself as a credible candidate. But if you read chapter 17, which covers the papal election at which Francis was elected you get a pleasant sense,tinged with innocent amusement, as cardinals drop hints over the course of a few days and the yet unsuspecting winner finally begins to discern that is happening,

This is a lovely book that I enjoyed greatly, and only the tiredness of late evening reading made me put it down, only for me to take it up in the following morning. I commend it to readers.

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