Francis’s Autobiography of Faithless Hope

Quote:“Receptiveness, and certainly not relativism, nor any change of doctrine, is the spirit and heart of Fiducia supplicans, the declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the blessing of couples who live in irregular situations, which I signed in December 2023. It is the people who are blessed, not the relationships. It arises from the wish not to ascribe one situation or one condition to the entire life of those who seek to be illuminated and accompanied with a blessing. Everyone in the Church is invited, including people who are divorced, including people who are homosexual, including people who are transgender. The first time that a group of transgender people came to the Vatican, they left in tears, moved because I had taken their hands, had kissed them . . . As if I had done something exceptional for them. But they are daughters of God! They can receive baptism on the same conditions as other believers and can perform the responsibilities of godparents on the same conditions as others, and likewise be witnesses to a marriage. No provision of canonical law forbids it.”

Quote:“From a sociological point of view, it is interesting to consider the phenomenon of traditionalism, this ‘backwardism’ that regularly returns each century, this reference to a supposed perfect age that each time is another age. With the liturgy, for example. It has now been ruled that the possibility of celebrating Mass in Latin, following the missal prior to the Second Vatican Council, must be expressly authorized by the Dicastery for Divine Worship, who will allow it only in special cases. For the reason that it is unhealthy for the liturgy to become ideology. It is curious to see this fascination for what is not understood, for what appears somewhat hidden, and seems also at times to interest the younger generations. This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness. These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.”

“The Spirit is the paraclete, the one that supports and gives company, that is a breath of life, not an anesthetizing gas. One day, as I was teaching two hundred young children at San Miguel, one of them confused it with paralytic and made me smile… but that is precisely the Church that we mustn’t be, a Church that is fixed, frozen. Our task certainly is to discern, to understand what today is asking of us, but in the knowledge that rigidity is not Christian, because it denies this movement of the Spirit. Rigidity is sectarian. Rigidity is self-referential. Rigidity is a daily heresy. It mistakes the Church for a fortress, for a castle standing high up, which looks down distantly and self-importantly on the world and on life, rather than living inside it.”

“Christians are not those who go backward. The flow of history and grace go up and down like the sap of a tree that bears fruit. Without this flow there is fossilization, and going backward is not conducive to life, ever. There is no progress, there is no movement. Life, whether vegetal or animal or human, dies. Progress means change, dealing with new situations, accepting new challenges. Vincent of Lérins, the fifth-century saint venerated by Catholics as well as members of the Orthodox Church, wrote in his Commonitórium primum that the dogma of the Christian religion follows these laws: It progresses, solidifying with years, growing with time, deepening with age. Human understanding changes over time, and the way that people perceive and express themselves changes—it is one thing for a man who expresses himself by carving the Winged Victory of Samothrace, another thing for Caravaggio, yet another for Chagall and then Dalí. And so too does human conscience deepen. . . Our responsibility is to journey in our own time, to continue growing in the art of meeting needs and providing for them with creativity of Spirit, which is always discernment in action. The Church is certainly not an orchestra in which everyone plays the same note but one in which each person follows their own score, and it is precisely this that must create harmony. It is wonderful that brothers and sisters have the courage to form their own ideas, to discuss them, to say what they think: Aspiring to unity does not mean uniformity. But then, we must still sit around the same table. In many respects, it can be said that the last ecumenical council has not yet been fully understood, lived, and applied. We are on the way and need to make up for lost time. When anyone asks me whether the time is right for a new council, for a Vatican III, I reply not just that the answer is no but that we still need to fully implement Vatican II. And need to sweep away even more the culture of courtliness, in the papal court and everywhere else. The Church is not a court, it is not a place for coteries, favoritism, machination, nor is it the last European court of an absolute monarchy. With Vatican II, the Church became a sign and instrument for the unity of the whole human race.”

Quote:“For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding ‘Therefore […] let the understanding, the knowledge, and wisdom of individuals as of all, of one man as of the whole Church, grow and progress strongly with the passage of the ages and the centuries; but let it be solely in its own genus, namely in the same dogma, with the same sense and the same understanding.’ (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 23, 3).”

Quote:“If we clerics don’t understand what a woman is and what a woman’s theology is, we will never understand what the Church is. One of the great sins we have committed has been to ‘masculinize’ it. The Church therefore needs to be ‘demasculinized’—while knowing, at the same time, that to ‘masculinize’ women would be neither human nor Christian, since the other great sin is certainly clericalism. It is therefore not a question of co-opting all women into the clergy, of making everyone become deacons in holy order, but of enhancing the Marian principle, so that it is even more important in the Church than the Petrine principle: Mary is more important than Peter, and the mystical nature of the woman is greater than the ministry. As has been stated in the concluding document of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, at which I chose for the first time not to make my apostolic exhortation, considering it to be immediately operative, there are no reasons to prevent women from assuming guiding roles in the Church: That which comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped. The question of access by women to diaconal ministry, with regard to which it is necessary to act with discernment, remains open to study. Whereas it is necessary to favor in every way the presence of women in the training of new priests: Seminarians will certainly obtain great benefit from it. It is true that women already provide a brilliant contribution to theological research and are present in positions of responsibility in ecclesiastical institutions or as community leaders, but it is necessary to give immediate and full concreteness to all opportunities provided, particularly where they remain unimplemented.”

Quote:“It is no good a person saying with total certainty that they have met God. If someone has answers to all the questions, this is proof that God is not with them. It means that they are a false prophet, someone who exploits religion, who uses it for themselves. The great guides of God’s people, like Moses, always left space for doubt.”

Quote:“But Christian hope is infinitely more than this: It is the certainty that we are born no longer to die, that we are born for the pinnacles, to enjoy happiness. It is the awareness that God has always loved us, and will always love us, and never leaves us alone. The apostle Paul says: ‘What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? […] No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us’ (Romans 8: 35–37). Christian hope is invincible because it is not a desire. It is the certainty that we are all traveling, not toward something that we want to be there, but something that is already there. . . . Hope never disappoints. Optimism is a valuable asset, an attitude of the mind, a quality of character that makes us lean toward a more positive view of things. But all the same, it is something that can be betrayed. Hope cannot. God cannot deprive us of hope, because He cannot deny Himself.”

Quote:“Lanza del Vasto, a polymath writer, philosopher, Christian thinker, and nonviolent campaigner against war and nuclear armament, an artisan of peace, noted that the worst lie, the greatest and most dangerous lie, is ‘truth minus one.’ Not truth, but its contrived appearance, its comic or dramatic distortion: an attitude that makes falsity credible, error acceptable, that makes the inept arrogant, the ignorant wise, the incompetent powerful. Judas is the master of the plausible, the master of gossip. And gossip and plausibility are the most treacherous opponents of the truth of things. There is always something devilish in gossip and in false accusation.”