Between selfies in South Korea and Italy, and giving out sleeping bags to the homeless around the Vatican on his birthday, Pope Francis is putting a more down-to-earth face on the Catholic Church. However, these efforts did not begin just when he became pope: Francis acted out his faith in Buenos Aires, when he “got mud in his shoes” along the path to serving God’s people.
Read “The Pope and Pandora’s Box” (Sojourners, February 2015) to learn more about Pope Francis’ unofficial biographer, Elisabetta Piqué, and her new book, Pope Francis: Life and Revolution.
Here are some interviews between the pontiff and Elisabetta Piquéfrom Argentina’s La Nacion.
1) Humor, Anecdotes, and a Laid Back Pope on a Rainy Afternoon: This is an informal interview between Piqué, her husband Gerry, and the pope. It starts with heavy rains in Rome and ends with a hug.
2) God Has Bestowed On Me a Healthy Dose of Unawareness: The Pope opens up to Piquéabout the recent struggles of the Catholic Church: gay marriage, divorce, the family. Pope Francis says he’s told himself from the beginning, “Jorge, don´t change, just keep on being yourself, because to change at your age would be to make a fool of yourself.”
3) The Synod on the Family: “The Divorced and Remarried Seem Excommunicated.”: When it comes right down to it, Pope Francis is less concerned about whether divorced persons can have communion and more interested in what the church is doing to bring them into the fold, integrated. “I am not afraid …of following this trail, the road of the synod. I am not afraid because it is the road that God has asked us to follow.”
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