He thus recounts the journey of his Italian grandparents who emigrated to Argentina in 1929 aboard a 3rd class boat, with his grandmother who had hidden her belongings in the lining of her coat. “There is nothing new in this, it is a story of yesterday as well as today,” he observes.
Pope Francis also returns to the conclave which led to his election in the wake of the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI. “I never imagined that the result of this conclave could directly concern me, so imagine if I had thought of a pope’s name,” he confides.
And to remember: “In Saint-Pierre those days a homeless man was walking with a sign around his neck reading ‘Pope Francis I’. This image would come to my mind only afterwards, when several newspapers published the photo”.
The Pope appoints a woman to head a dicastery for the first time
He reveals that he has not watched television since 1990 following a wish he had after accidentally seeing “sordid images” which deeply “offended” him. He admits to “rare exceptions” to this wish, notably during the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.
As a result, he hasn’t seen a match of his favorite football team San Lorenzo “for thirty years”, but “a Swiss guard leaves the results” of their matches on his desk.
-Since his election, which resulted in isolation linked to power, “going out to eat pizza is one of the little things that I miss the most,” he says. “A pizza eaten on a table outside tastes very different from a pizza delivered to your home: I am a citizen at heart.”
“When I was a cardinal, I loved walking the streets and taking the metro. The streets speak to me so much, they are full of lessons,” he notes.
In this work written in collaboration with the Italian journalist Carlo Musso and presented by his French publisher Albin Michel as “the first autobiography ever published by a pope during his lifetime”, the pope also returns to the difficulties of his pontificate.
This is particularly the case of his reform of the Vatican bureaucracy, particularly the imposition of rules in the financial field, which aroused “the greatest resistance to change”.
