KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
February 3, 2020
By Michael Sean Winters
Pope Francis poses with people during his general audience in Paul VI hall at the Vatican Jan. 29. (CNS/Paul Haring)
Next month, we will celebrate the seventh anniversary of the election of Pope Francis. In some ways, it is hard to remember what we were feeling before it became obvious that this first pontiff from the Americas would be a reforming pope. In other ways, it seems like yesterday that Pope Benedict XVI resigned from his office and flew off to Castel Gandolfo. And, so before we start the looks back and looks ahead for this anniversary’s occasion, it is good to ground ourselves. Fortunately, at hand is just the book to do it, Austen Ivereigh’s Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church.
Just as Ivereigh’s 2014 biography The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope helped many of us better understand what experiences had formed the new pope before his election, this new book provides a much needed, lucidly written, look at the past seven years. Remarkably, he does so in part by taking a swipe at his earlier biography! At a June 2018 meeting, the pope warned Ivereigh against the “great man” myth in writing his book:
I realize now that ‘The Great Reformer’ contributed to that myth, written in the dizzying first months of his pontificate, the parallels with his life — how he appeared at moments of crisis in the church — offered an irresistible narrative: cometh the hour; cometh the man. I cringe now that I even likened him to a gaucho riding out at first light.
Okay, okay: The gaucho reference was cringeworthy. But, Ivereigh’s biography, combined with Elisabetta Piqué’s Pope Francis: Life and Revolution were indispensable early volumes that helped the rest of us understand Jorge Maria Bergoglio’s life before March 13, 2013.
I suspect that Chapter 5 of the current volume will be the one that most engages an American audience, as it focuses on the pope’s real conversion on the clergy sex abuse issue. At first, the pope had received lousy information about the situation in Chile. After he was faced with ongoing and credible objections, he dispatched Archbishop Charles Scicluna to investigate, and Scicluna documented the depth of the problem and how wrong the pope had been. The pope took this very public self-correction to heart.
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