“He gave me a big white box,” Francis wrote. “Documents about the most difficult and painful situations. Cases of abuse, corruption, black dealings and fraud.”
“We have it all here,” Francis remembers being told. “Now it’s your turn” to deal with it.
CNN reports that the pope wrote in his book that he felt “called to take responsibility for all the wrongs committed by certain priests.”
A photo of the two sitting with a white box between them fueled speculation at the time.
Francisco, formerly known as Jorge Bergoglio, uses this new book to tell the story of his youth in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There he grew up in a large family and was passionate about soccer and tango. He admitted that when he was younger, he got into an argument with a classmate and was thrown to the ground and hit his head, “even losing consciousness,” and that even after becoming a church leader, he continued to commit “mistakes and sins.” He claimed that
“I feel that I have a reputation that I don’t deserve and that I don’t deserve public opinion,” Francis wrote. “Without a doubt, this is my strongest feeling.”
The memoir recounts key moments as pontiff, including the two assassination attempts he faced during a 2021 trip to Iraq, which were revealed in excerpts from Italian daily Corriere Sera last month.
