✣ Francis gives first book-length interview
What happened? Pope Francis’s book, The Name of God is Mercy, an extended interview with Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli, was published this week. The title on the cover, in the Pope’s own handwriting in many editions, emphasises that this is a very personal work. The book contains Francis’s thoughts on the divorced, homosexuality and other issues. He emphasises that the Church “does not exist to condemn people” but to share a message of the “infinite mercy of God”. What the media are saying The British press in general have given favourable reports of the book, stressing the message of its title: mercy. Caroline Wyatt of the BBC wrote that Francis “makes clear that the Church does not exist to condemn people but to bring them to God’s mercy, and uses the image of a field hospital, a place for the ‘urgent care’ which is needed ‘where there is combat’”. The Telegraph headlined its report: “Pope Francis: ‘I could have been in jail if I wasn’t pontiff’. Francis calls for Church to be more welcoming of gays and divorcees as he lays bare own family’s struggles.” Pink News predictably focused on another theme: “Pope Francis urges Catholics to accept LGBT people in new book.” What the vaticanisti are saying Peter Stanford wrote in the Guardian: “Question-and-answer sessions, spread over 150 pages, usually feel clumsy and can be an ordeal to plough through, but Francis’s chatty tone, his repeated references to episodes in his own life and his clear, down-to-earth language, so rarely found in papal pronouncements, make The Name of God is Mercy a pleasure to read.” John Allen noted at cruxnow.com that of the five previous popes since Vatican II that Francis cites, “the one he alludes to most is John Paul I”. Allen describes the short-lived pope as “warm, compassionate, genuinely happy to be with ordinary people, a man of obvious faith who didn’t wear his piety on his sleeve or take himself too seriously”, and adds: “Sound like anyone you know?”
