The first ever memoir by a living pope reveals a warm, emotionally intelligent man who loves football and ‘cutting-edge’ cinema – but skates over the more controversial parts of his career

Popes seldom lack a platform or a pulpit, so they have had little need to resort to autobiography to explain themselves. What books do appear under their names in recent decades have been either dull transcriptions of interviews with tame journalists that have been heavily vetted by the Vatican, or compilations of old sermons packaged as something more than they are.

I therefore approached this new volume with a certain weary caution and was pleasantly surprised. It fully justifies its bold claim to be the first ever memoir by a living pope. Indeed, Francis’s Italian ghostwriter, the publisher Carlo Musso, reveals in a brief afterword that the original plan when the book was commissioned in 2019 was that it would not appear until after his death. So why the sudden urgency?