Pope Francis opens his heart in new ‘autobiography’

“I continue to feel just the same great, profound love” for Argentina, says Pope Francis in his new book, Hope. The book, styled as an autobiography, has just been released worldwide in 16 languages (including English). It is the featured book on Aleteia's "Big Winter Books" for 2025.

A few days ago, four Italian daily newspapers (La Stampa, Avvenire, Il Messaggero and Il Giorno) published a series of extracts from the new book, which is based on interviews with journalist Carlo Musso.

Among the many themes, the Pope talks about his family origins and his parents' migration from Italy to Argentina in the late 1920s.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio reveals several violent and traumatic episodes from his youth in Argentina. One is the suicide of a former technical school classmate, “the most intelligent and gifted of us all,” who was imprisoned after shooting a neighborhood friend.

For the future pope, his visits to this imprisoned comrade constituted his “first actual experience of prison,” a place he describes as terrible and disturbing. He subsequently has paid great attention to prisoners in his religious and priestly life, and later in his episcopate and pontificate.

The Pope recalls his relationship with Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1989), whom he welcomed with his students when he was professor of literature and psychology at Santa Fe College. Francis expressed his admiration for this great author, who had become totally blind by that time and made great physical efforts to meet the students.

“At the age of sixty-six, he took a coach from Buenos Aires and traveled for eight hours, at night, to reach Santa Fe. We arrived late on one of those occasions because, when I went to collect him at the hotel, he asked me if I could help him shave,” Pope Francis recounts.

He describes Borges as “an agnostic who recited the Lord’s Prayer every night because he had promised his mother he’d do so, and who would die with the last rites.”

The Pope emphasizes the importance of humor, quoting the French writer Romain Gary (1914-1980), who defined humor as “an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.”

Francis explains that his family “experienced no shortage of difficulties, suffering, tears, but even in our hardest moments, we discovered how a smile, a laugh, could give us that added strength to get back on track.”

The Pope looks back with amusement on his audience with comedians last spring.

“One of them quipped that it’s good trying to make God laugh … except that, being omniscient, He will know all the jokes in advance… and will ruin your punch line,” he recalls.

Francis notes that many priests have a sense of humor, but so do popes, mentioning in particular the sense of repartee of his predecessors John XXIII and John Paul II.

The first pope to come from the Society of Jesus says he particularly enjoys jokes about Jesuits, which remind him of “those about the carabinieri in Italy, or Jewish mothers in Yiddish humor.”

Francis shares one as an example:

With a great sense of self-deprecating humor, the pontiff also has fun recounting the joke of “Pope Francis in America.” In this story, he lands in New York for his apostolic trip, and decides to take the wheel of the limousine sent to pick him up. Speeding, he is pursued and stopped by the police, and the story takes an unexpected twist ...

The Pope also highlights the simplicity of children, who “are examples of spontaneity, of humanity, and they remind us that those who give up their own humanity give up everything, and that when it becomes hard for us to cry seriously or laugh passionately, then we really are on the downhill slope.”

The Pope returns at length to his family roots in Argentina, evoking the sinking of the ship Mafalda in which his grandparents and father were supposed to have embarked. The sinking of the “Italian Titanic” claimed between 300 and 600 lives, a figure that is difficult to establish given the large number of stowaways on board.

Francis also recalls the births of his brothers and sisters to a close-knit family. He also recalls the presence of a pet that marked his childhood: “Churrinche, a small dog of undefined and undefinable breed, whom we named in honor of another indomitable four-legged creature from the Pampas that had belonged to our maternal grandparents.”

Francis describes Argentina as “a young country on a remote and boundless plain, created from one of the most out-of-the-way and suburban colonies of the vast Spanish empire, though without the glittering allure of precious metals. A country whose complex, tragic, and wondrous history is condensed into little more than two centuries and a handful of generations. My homeland, for which I continue to feel just the same great, profound. The people for whom I pray every day, who formed me, who trained and then offered me to others,” adds Pope Francis.