Editor's Note: 'Life' is one of many wonderful reads to be found on Aleteia's 2024 Summer Book List for Adults.
Life: My Story Through History by Pope Francis
Published by Harper One, 2024
As the years kept passing after my dad died unexpectedly (during the Great Jubilee 2000), I came to realize that my biggest regret is that I didn’t ask him stuff.
I’m one of the younger kids in a big, Catholic family, and my dad married late, so that meant he was some decades older than the dads of most of my friends. In fact, this year we would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Not only did he remember living in the Great American Dust Bowl and going through childhood and teen years during the Great Depression, but he also served in the Army during the aftermath of World War II in Japan. I mean, what a collection of stories he had tucked away!
But I have hardly any of them. Just a few, sent in letters during a few years that I was far from home.
He was, perhaps, naturally reserved. And maybe a lot of his memories were hard to talk about. It could be that he figured I wasn’t interested, and maybe (horribly) I wouldn’t have been. In any case, he didn’t share much, and I didn’t have the sense to ask.
Memories of a life
All of this came to mind as I whizzed through the book released this year, styled as Pope Francis’ autobiography, called Life: My Story Through History.
It’s not really an autobiography, in the sense of someone sitting down to write memoirs. It’s doubtful the Pope would have time for an endeavor like that! Instead, it’s a uniquely organized book-interview put together by Fabio Marchese Ragona.
The journalist provides commentary and context, and then the Pope’s words are interwoven so that it seems you’ve gone to visit your grandfather, and he’s telling you how it all happened. It goes right in line with what he's always encouraging: "Young people and children must speak with their grandparents to carry history forward!"
Pope Francis, who was born in 1936, has plenty of great memories to share, as well as his perspectives on how the world lived the momentous events of the last near-century.
Intimate communication
It begins with his impressions as a child living through World War II, and particularly the war’s jubilant end, even in far-away Argentina.
He brings the reader to the “giant leap for mankind” with the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, closer to our time, the attack on the Twin Towers, and the pandemic.
We get to know his beloved grandmother, Rosa, but also the grandparents from the other side of the family. We hear just how horrific the dictatorship in Argentina was.
There are amusing anecdotes … like how the Argentinean future pope was in Germany studying, precisely when Argentina beat Germany for the World Cup in a controversial match.
Our life is the most precious 'book' we have been given.
Great things in little things
Perhaps what best sums up the beauty of this book, though, is a quote offered by Ragona in the introduction.
He writes:
“Our life is the most precious ‘book’ we have been given,” the pontiff said during a cycle of catechesis he launched in 2022, dedicated to the theme of discernment, “a book that, unfortunately, many people do not read, or rather they do so too late, before dying. And yet, precisely in that book, one finds what one pointlessly seeks elsewhere … We might ask ourselves: Have I ever recounted my life to anyone? It is one of the most beautiful and intimate forms of communication, recounting one’s own life. It allows us to discover hitherto unknown things, small and simple, but, as the gospel says, it is precisely from the little things that the great things are born.”
Life is an easy read, as it is as simple as enjoying stories. And, of course, it gives insight into the experiences and events that formed the man who would be chosen by the Holy Spirit as Peter for our day.
