VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
The Guardian [London, England]
January 13, 2025
By Angela Giuffrida
Pope Francis says in his autobiography he received a ‘large white box’ relating to ‘difficult and painful situations’
Pope Francis has said he inherited a “large white box” full of documents related to various scandals faced by the Catholic church when he took over from his predecessor.
The pontiff makes the revelation in his much-anticipated autobiography, Spera (Hope), which is published on Tuesday.
Francis became pope in 2013 after the shock resignation of Benedict XVI, a decision that meant the Argentinian was in the almost unprecedented position of being able to have an in-person handover when he started.
Shortly after his election as pope, he recalls in his book, he visited Benedict at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome.
“He gave me a large white box,” Francis writes. “‘Everything is in here’, he told me. ‘Documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations. Cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings.’”
Benedict then told him: “I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people. Now it’s your turn.”
In Hope, Pope Francis says: “I have continued along his path.”
He does not, however, specify the contents of the box or any scandals that had been addressed either by Benedict, who died in December 2022, or by himself during his almost 12-year papacy.
In February 2013, Benedict became the first pontiff in almost 600 years to resign, saying his health was deteriorating. A deeply conservative pontiff, his tenure was overshadowed by sexual abuse scandals in the church. He retired leaving a chequered reputation after a papacy that was at times divisive.
The last year of Benedict’s papacy was also tarnished by the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal, which exposed allegations of corruption, internal conflict and financial mismanagement.
Although there were reports about the existence of the white box in 2013 and in later years, the passage in Hope is the first time Pope Francis has spoken on the record about it.
The Italian publisher Mondadori has said Hope is the first autobiography published by a pope, although Francis has published other memoir-style works.
In the book, which was written with the Italian author Carlo Musso, Francis describes the process of his conclave, which is rare for a pontiff. “When my name was pronounced for the seventy-seventh time, there was a burst of applause, while reading of the votes went on,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how many votes there were in the end, I was no longer listening, the voice covered the voice of the scrutineer.”
In a passage about women, Pope Francis writes that “the Church is female – it is not male” and says there is an urgent need to “move forward” in identifying new methods and criteria to ensure “women are more fully involved and play a key role in the various spheres of social and ecclesiastical life”.
However, he rules out women becoming priests. “One of the great sins we have committed has been to ‘masculinise’ it [the church]. The church therefore needs to be ‘demasculinised’– while knowing, at the same time, that to ‘masculinise’ women would be neither human nor Christian, since the other great sin is certainly clericalism,” he writes.
In the book Francis also reveals he escaped a double suicide bombing during a visit to Iraq in 2021 after the attempts on his life were foiled by British intelligence and Iraqi police.