26 NOVEMBER 2020, THE TABLET
Our guide to the future: Pope Francis' Covid-19 challenge
The world post-Covid
This unexpected turnaround has happened before in his life, most recently in 2012-13, when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio turned 75 and offered Benedict XVI his resignation as archbishop of Buenos Aires. He began to put his papers in order and plan his retirement. Instead, he found himself called to Rome, and to what he likes laughingly to call a “change of diocese”.
There is no evidence that Francis had been getting ready to retire in 2020. But he had seen it as the conclusion of a “seven-year plan” (it had originally been a five-year plan, but when the strength of the opposition to his reforms became clear, he decided to extend it). This was to be the year that the reorganisation of how the Vatican serves the life of the Church would be bedded down in a new constitution, when the financial reorganisation came together, and when the various pastoral reforms – in the selection of bishops and cardinals, the training of priests, the anti-abuse measures – acquired citizenship in the Church.
There would even be a final encyclical, on fraternity, to close out a teaching triptych aimed at regenerating the three key relationships made joyless by technocracy: with God (Evangelii Gaudium), with Creation (Laudato Si’) and with each other (Fratelli Tutti). In Bergoglio’s mind, in other words, 2020 was to be a wrap-up year, his work completed, after which he would be ready to retire, if God so disposed: after Benedict’s funeral, say; or if illness or frailty struck.
But it was Covid that struck. Initially, he seemed taken aback. The shock of the papa solus in an empty wet St Peter’s Square on 27 March, speaking of the darkness enveloping the world, led Italian commentators to declare – in Alberto Melloni’s words – the “beginning of the end” of his pontificate. But they hadn’t seen what was emerging in that Urbi et Orbi address, and would be refined over Easter: Francis’ deep discernment of the moment. It was laid bare, tantalisingly, in his interview with me published in The Tablet on 8 April, when he put on display his awareness of the swirling spiritual movements, the choices and temptations, facing the world.
I was fascinated by those intuitions, which left me hungry to know more. It was that interview – and the good working relationship I had with him preparing for it – that is in many ways behind the book that is about to hit the shelves. Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better World is Francis’ deep reading of this moment, this kairos. Francis sees this crisis as a threshold moment, in which we can choose or refuse change. On our response, collectively, as a people, our future now depends. And to make the right choices means understanding where the Spirit is calling us.
These intuitions, of course, fed his startling homilies and speeches over Easter, which carried a new urgency and boldness; and they were behind his announcement of the post-Covid Vatican commission, which he entrusted to a dynamic young Argentine priest well known in the UK for his years of work at Cafod. The Pope told Augusto Zampini-Davies that his commission was to “prepare the future” in dialogue with experts across the world.
This wasn’t a papacy that was winding down, cut off, but the opposite: cranking up, refuelled, newly engaged.
My own intuition was that the Pope had not yet spelled out his thinking, and that the world badly needed it. So in a letter in May I plucked up some parrhesia. Would he consider this time addressing a broader audience than he had in his Tablet interview – and going much deeper? Might he use me to pen a book-length love letter to humanity, packed with spiritual guidance, for this time of crisis?
Yes, he replied by letter – but he would need my help. “I leave it in your hands,” he added gnomically. I understood. We were both in lockdown; his time was limited; the world was in crisis. The book must be focused, tight, with a proper narrative; it needed a plan, and a form. My role would be to supply the scaffolding on to which he could hang his insights, his language, and his ideas. I sent him a detailed sketch for a three-part short book to come out in late autumn. We got to work in June, and finished in early September, as the world emerged from the first lockdown.
The see-judge-act method that underpins Let Us Dream has long been used by the Latin American Church and in his pontificate – in Laudato Si’, for example – to reflect the process of conversion itself. In opening up to reality, to let it speak to us, we contemplate our world; we discern by uncovering what is of God and what undermines it, choosing the first; and then we propose bold plans and decisions based on that discernment. Hence the three “Times” of Let Us Dream: To See, To Choose, and To Act.
The raw materials varied: recordings in answer to my questions; existing writings of his that I was familiar with from his Jesuit period or his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires; his Covid reflections; and unpublished texts he sent me. And there was also the odd phone call. Sometimes, in answer to a question, he would point to something he or someone else had written (almost always supplied with page references, “in case it’s useful”), or he would give me a series of thoughts and say: “I don’t know if that makes sense: if it doesn’t, feel free to ignore it.” I was given great freedom to draft; the Pope trusts those he gives tasks to. But the text is wholly his: not only did I draft from his words, he did not hesitate to strike out and rewrite, or use drafts to jump off into a new text.
It was hard graft, because we were working both in English and Spanish against a horrendous timetable – “this is an inhuman process!” he at one point (rightly) objected – but somehow it worked. And all the time I never stopped thinking what a privilege it is to be a mediator in the true sense of the word: one who enables and facilitates without interposing. (In the book the Pope critiques those who “cease to mediate and become intermediaries, obscuring our view of reality”.) The book is conventionally subtitled “In Conversation with Austen Ivereigh”, but I like that I never appear, except for a note at the end to explain why.
Francis is a delight to work with: fast, precise, punctual, but also gracious, funny, and endlessly insightful. He is a natural writer. Allergic to clichés, adept at startling metaphors, he knows how to wrap up an idea by circling back to where he started, and he loves to go off in an unexpected direction, always opening out to the new thing the Spirit might be offering. In the book he calls this “unfinished thinking”, and says he learned it from Romano Guardini. It means I often had to press him to spell something out, or explain it; and in his patient re-expression of the idea would stumble on the clarity that his initial, visceral intuition sometimes lacked.
Only one section caused tension: when I asked him to give examples from his own life of what he called “personal Covids” – times of stoppage when life is turned upside down. He dislikes intensely talking about himself, and I had to go back two or three times asking him for more, feeling guilty for pressing him; but he did as I asked, humbly apologising for “a certain inhibition, because I’m used to being reserved”. These are some of the richest passages in the book. Later, in Part Three (“A Time to Act”), he gives his first account – again, very moving – of encountering the cartoneros (garbage pickers) at Mass in Buenos Aires, and going off with them through the streets at night.
Three things make Let Us Dream unprecedented. It is the first book written by a modern pope in response to a particular crisis. It is the first to be addressed directly to the reader (rather than in response to questions). And it is the first to be simultaneously drafted in two languages: the original text is in both English and Spanish. To explain: my exchanges with Francis were always in Spanish. But at his suggestion I then produced a draft in English, so that it read more naturally and fluently. That freedom and trust meant that – as I told him – his would be the first book written by a pope in which the Successor of St Peter would not sound slightly weird in English. (He liked that.)
We also agreed that, in the Spanish text, he would keep the vos second-person singular typical of the Spanish of the porteños, the people of Buenos Aires. Spaniards tend to be snooty about this: in Vatican texts Francis sounds more madrileño than porteño. But in Soñemos Juntos – the Spanish-language title – the Pope speaks as if he is sitting opposite you.
Despite its directness and informality, the subject of Let Us Dream could not be more important or solemn. It is about how God enters history, above all at times of suffering and crisis. But it is also personal spiritual direction: it’s about how we can open out to receive that Spirit, that new direction, in our lives as much as in society – the graces a merciful God holds out to us in tribulation, and how, in closing off, we resist and miss them. It is about the Flood, but also the Ark that waits to take us to a better place.
But I suspect the immediate fascination of Let Us Dream is in what it reveals of Pope Francis’ multi-layered mind. To hear him spiritually diagnose opposition and division in the Church in terms of the isolated conscience, or teach us how to maintain contrapositions (polar tensions) so they do not fall into contradictions, or explain how the discernment at the synods was undermined by black-and-white media reports, you realise what an original, and penetrating, intellect he has, steeped in tradition but never exhausted by it.
I did get to see him in person, at the end of September, while in Rome to speak at the Jesuit curia. At his office and residence in the Santa Marta I presented him with the copyedited PDF text for him to make final corrections. He had lost weight, was upbeat, firing on all cylinders: as people close to him tell me, this crisis has energised him. As we entered his office, he pointed to a sign on the door in Italian: Vietato Lamentarsi (“No Complaining”). “If you come in here, you have to obey,” he laughed.
His office was small, stacked with books and papers, but well organised. On one of the shelves I spotted a dictionary of lunfardo, the rich slang of Buenos Aires, and we agreed how useful it was. We had some business; he wrote a letter out by hand, and made a call. He never wastes a moment, but is unhurried. He gives off a deep peace.
When we were finished, he took me out along the corridor to his priest secretary to agree the best practical way in which to deal with any final corrections that he might have (he had a lot, of course). Then he took me downstairs to wave me off tenderly, a man with a mission to show us the horizon we cannot yet see.
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