12 Things to Know About Francis| National Catholic Register

A selective life story of Pope Francis was published in January. While largely focused on events, Hope: The Autobiography also includes moral and spiritual reflections.

Some have noted that much of the information is already well-known. However, for those less familiar with Pope Francis, the book offers interesting insights, not only from what he says but in what he leaves unsaid.

Here are some key takeaways:

1. Butcher, Chemist, Chocolate Analyst

The white apron and sharp knife of a sure-handed butcher in a Buenos Aires street market of the 1940s fascinated the young Jorge, to the point where he thought he’d like to become one.

“It was a spectacle to see him chopping the meat into pieces, with fast and accurate cuts, and he also seemed to be earning good money,” the Pope writes.

As a teenager, he thought about becoming a doctor, and later he thought he might like to be a chemist.

During high school, he studied food science at a state chemistry institute.

“I remember we once had to analyze the rancidity of chocolate, and between one test and the other, I confess that I ate quite a lot,” he writes.

2. Papal Pugilist

Two boys at the chemistry institute stood out as less than competent, and they got a lot of bullying — including from Pope Francis, who fought one of them.

He’s not proud of it.

“In the fight I had thrown him to the ground, and he struck his head as he fell and even lost his senses; and I had done it moreover in a cowardly manner which was beneath me,” the Pope writes, without elaborating.

He says his father took him to the boy’s home, where he apologized to him.

Years later, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he met the boy again, who by that point had become an evangelical minister with five children “and seemed a man of great kindness.”

3. He Was Not a Good Athlete

Pope Francis is at least the second pope who often played soccer goalie in his youth.

But unlike St. John Paul II, whose companions described him as a good athlete, Pope Francis was not.

“I always enjoyed playing soccer, and it hardly matters that I wasn’t very good at it,” Pope Francis writes.

There’s a term in Argentina for people like him, he writes: pata dura, “which means having two left feet.”

4. Close Encounter With Confession

On Sept. 21, 1953, when Jorge was 16, he was out doing an errand for his mother when he felt a strange urge to enter a church he was passing.

Once inside, he saw a priest he had never seen before — “even though this was the church I went to regularly for Sunday Mass.”

“All of a sudden I felt a need to confess,” he writes.

He went to confession to the priest, who treated him “with loving kindness.”

Afterward, he said, “The fact is that I was no longer the same, and I left with the knowledge that I would become a priest.”

5. His Mother Was Against His Priestly Vocation 

Pope Francis paints his mother’s family as practicing Catholics but not especially zealous. His mom was baptized nearly a year and a half after she was born, for instance.

In December 1955, when Jorge was about 18, his mother made a disturbing discovery in his bedroom: “theology textbooks; above all, some in Latin.”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to be a doctor?” his mother asked him.

Yes, he said, “but for souls instead.”

That didn’t mollify her.

She didn’t go with him the day he moved to a diocesan seminary, didn’t attend his formal entry ceremony, and never visited him there.

Only later, when he entered a Jesuit seminary, did she accompany him — along with his father, who had accepted his son’s vocation — yet “she maintained a certain reserve in the early days.”

6. Lingering Regrets

In 2009, then-Cardinal Bergoglio called a police officer’s father to apologize for an incident 59 years earlier, when they were schoolboys. After the boy borrowed Bergoglio’s bicycle and damaged it, Bergoglio insisted that he pay for the repairs. Looking back, he felt he had been “unfair” and “ungenerous.”

The Pope also says he emotionally hurt an elderly priest, a dear family friend, twice in the fall of 1961.

He thwarted the old priest’s wish to take a picture of the five Bergoglio siblings with their father as Mr. Bergoglio lay dying in the hospital. A few weeks later, when he visited the now-dying priest in the hospital, he arrived while the priest was asleep, left the room without waking him, and later falsely sent word that he had already left the hospital.

“I don’t know what happened to me, whether it was shyness, ineptitude, or grief — grief over the death of my father, on top of this new prospect of grief, or something else,” he says. “But one thing is certain: I have often felt a deep pain and suffering for this lie of mine.”

7. Tends Toward Melancholy

“I was prone to sudden nostalgic feelings for the past,” Pope Francis says of himself during childhood. “Not sadness as much as melancholy.”

He didn’t grow out of it.

His 10th or 11th birthday bothered him, even as his grandparents were arriving to celebrate it with him.

“This melancholy has sometimes returned,” he writes. “From time to time it’s a place in which I find myself, a place that I have learned to recognize.”

He acknowledges in the book having seen for nearly a year a psychiatrist — “a very wise and capable Jewish woman” whose “suggestions were always helpful.” He says he remembers them and finds them “instructive even today.”

8. Laughter Is Good Medicine

Sadness is not the best path to God, according to Pope Francis.

“A person who is sad, in the end, is always a sad Christian,” he writes.

The same is true of anger.

“A bad temper is never a sign of sanctity — quite the contrary,” he writes.

Instead, he says, joy is essential.

“Few other living creatures know how to laugh: We are made in the image of God and our God smiles. We must smile with him. We can even smile at him, with the affection that we feel for fathers, and in the same way we play and joke with people we love.”

He says he has said St. Thomas More’s “Prayer for Good Humor” every day for more than 40 years.

9. His Reaction to JFK

For many U.S. Catholics, the election of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States 65 years ago was a watershed moment, when Catholics felt they had finally arrived in American society.

Many outside of the United States also saw limitless possibilities in the “New Frontier” that JFK promised, in the form of ending poverty, exploring space, and advancing freedom throughout the world.

Pope Francis, however, saw things differently.

“I remember that one priest in Buenos Aires was jubilant when John F. Kennedy — a Catholic — was elected president in 1960, almost as if Pope John himself had been elected to the White House. Such naiveté infuriated me.”

He doesn’t elaborate in the book, and never mentions Kennedy again.

10. Not a Fan of Television

Father Bergoglio was watching television with fellow Jesuits in Buenos Aires one time in 1990, “and a sordid scene appeared on the screen, which deeply offended me,” he writes.

“I got up and left,” he writes. “It was as if God had told me that the television was not for me, that it did me no good.”

During a Mass, he says, “I made a vow to Our Lady” not to watch television.

He made exceptions to follow news of an airplane crash in Buenos Aires in 1999 and the terror attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, but “little else.”

As a result, he doesn’t even watch his favorite soccer team, San Lorenzo, in Buenos Aires. But a member of the Swiss Guard, “who leaves the results and league tables on my desk,” helps him follow the team from afar.

11. Pope and Pizza Connoisseur

When he was a child, the Bergoglios would go to San Lorenzo soccer games and then celebrate afterward with pizza and snails in hot sauce.

“I can still smell the aroma of the pizza,” Pope Francis writes. “To tell the truth, going out for a pizza is one of the small things that I miss most.”

12. A Funeral for a Pastor

Pope Francis has said he wants to be buried at the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome. While other popes are buried there, most popes in modern times have been buried at St. Peter’s Basilica.

Pope Francis’ funeral will also look different from those of his predecessors in recent ages.

“The funeral service was excessive, so I have arranged with the master of ceremonies to lighten it: no catafalque [raised platform], no ceremony for the closure of the casket, nor the deposition of the cypress casket into a second of lead and a third of oak,” Pope Francis says.

“With dignity, but like any Christian, because the bishop of Rome is a pastor and a disciple, not a powerful man of this world.”

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