It’s considered bad form to respond to negative – or in this case, mixed – reviews of one’s book, and I don’t intend to do that here. But I was struck by a parenthetical remark in a critique of my memoir, From Fire, by Water, which recently appeared in the Tablet. My Catholicism, the reviewer said in implicit reproach, is “much more Benedict’s than Francis’s”. At first, I bristled: as if a Catholic’s spiritual orientation can be reduced to the choice between our two popes!
But then I remembered that I had used variations of the same line in private conversation, especially during my first few months as a newly baptised and confirmed Catholic. Plus, the memoir itself has an entire chapter devoted to Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, which I describe as the one book to which I “owed, and still owe, my soul and my salvation”. The Argentine Pontiff, by contrast, doesn’t make an appearance in my book.
