Co-authored with Carlo Musso, the book, which was written over six years was translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, who also happens to be the translator of Umberto Eco’s later works. In a note towards the end of the book, Musso writes that “this exceptional document was originally intended to be published after [Pope Francis’] death. But the new Jubilee of Hope and the circumstances of this moment” — perhaps hinting at the then hospitalised pope’s fragile health — convinced the principal author to share his “precious legacy” in his lifetime.

Divided into 25 chapters, Hope begins with an arresting and unlikely prologue. It tells the story of the sinking of “the Italian Titanic”, the SS Principessa Mafalda (named after Princess Mafalda of Savoy, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy). Pope Francis writes, “My grandparents and their only son, Mario, the young man who would become my father, had bought their ticket for that long crossing, for that ship that set sail from the port of Genoa on October 11, 1927, bound for Buenos Aires.” As fate had it, the Bergoglio family didn’t take the journey because “they couldn’t sell what they owned in time”, making the pope ever thankful to “Divine Providence”.

While Pope Francis’ grandparents couldn’t manage to take SS Principessa Mafalda, they did sail on the SS Giulio Cesare. Like everyone else, they moved in search of a better standard of living or perhaps to escape poverty. The pope writes about this journey in the first chapter, May My Tongue Stick to My Palate, which is revelatory, for it underscores why he spoke with so much empathy about the plight of refugees, making him conclude that migration is “a story of yesterday as much as one of today.”

This is a characteristic feature of the recollections of Pope Francis. He manages to contextualise the past in a way that not only helps the reader understand the chaotic present but also points towards the future. Perhaps this is why Rainer Maria Rilke’s quote from Letter Eight features as an epigraph: “The future enters into us / so as to transform itself in us / long before it happens.” Additionally, Pope Francis shares a personal anecdote and marries it effectively with the causes of the issues facing us. For example, he notes that the “greatest producer of migrants is war” but whenever one is asked to reflect on who can be held culpable of the “bloodshed”, they quickly absolve themselves. This then results in “the globalisation of indifference”. Perhaps this explains why genocides are carried out in plain sight.

In the initial chapters, the pope remembers his grandparents, Italian immigrants to Argentina, Nono Giovanni and Nona Rosa extremely fondly. Nona Rosa gave birth to six children, but only Mario, the pope’s father, survived. He informs readers of his father’s salary, which was “far from ‘a fair wage to the workers’”. “It makes us understand how, then as now, work was and is an essential condition but is too frequently insufficient for personal freedom, for independence, or for escaping poverty,” he states. This demonstrates, once again, his belief in the politics of equality and fairness. In chapters like They Feed upon My People as They Feed upon Bread, he remembers and honours Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, the person in charge of a test laboratory where he worked as a schoolboy.

The pope often apologises and seeks forgiveness for past “evils”. The sexual abuse of children is mentioned in the chapter titled Responding with the Deepest Vibrations. In telling the story of a “paraplegic boy” who was taken advantage of, the pope underlines that these crimes must be condemned, that “no silence or concealment can be tolerated”, and that he wanted the “victims to know that the pope is on their side”. However, he doesn’t address in full measure the Chile Church scandal, for which he was heavily criticised. He allowed bishop Juan Barros Madrid, who knew the abuser of minors, Fernando Karadima, to lead a mass in Chile. So, though the pope is self-critical in several parts of the book, he, as The Guardian reviewer Catherine Pepinster rightly points out, “skates over the row”.

While there are many overwhelming bits in this memoir, there are lighter moments too. The pope had a tremendous sense of humour and recollects many hilarious incidents from his early life. One has him and other children, “creep up to [a widow’s] bedroom window”. They would start “shouting, calling, banging” on it whenever she had a policeman home.

An insightful read, the papal autobiography manages to achieve the goal that Musso outlines in his note: the “fervent desire to pass on two of the most enduring things human beings can bequeath: roots and wings.”

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.