One of the things one looks forward to when opening a John Cornwell book on the latest civil war battle in the church, or a new papal portrait (he’s written four), is the intimacy of his first-hand reporter-turned-academic anecdotal style. One can almost smell the plate of “double-egged fettuccine”, washed down with a second bottle of Antinori Chianti as he gossips with his high-ranking Vatican sources in some Roman trattoria that one would love to know the name of.
But not in this engaging book where he shadows the first seven years of Francis’s papacy like a canon lawyer, guarding his subject and skilfully defending his reputation at every turn. The normal baroque feast of journalistic details and years of dogged scholastic research is not what the reader is served up in this fascinating, heartfelt and often deeply personal account of Pope Francis and his revolutionary papal regime.
