Kanskje jeg skal lese denne boka, for det er ikke alltid like lett å forstå pave Frans. Slik kan vi lese på First Things:
An important new book has appeared that carefully evaluates Francis’s pontificate, and provides something the pope—for all his good deeds—often hasn’t: context and clarity.
What Pope Francis Really Said by Tom Hoopes, writer in residence at Benedictine College, is one of the best books to appear on the subject—because it avoids caricaturing Francis, from either the left or the right, and strives to get to the heart of his papacy by studying the full context of his teachings. A second strength is that it rescues Francis from distortion without overlooking his flaws.
Hoopes comments: To try to understand what Pope Francis wants from the Church in the twenty-first century, we should start by invoking Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. Our understanding of Pope Francis has become knotted up with conflicting feelings fed by mistaken reporting, false adulation, rash judgment, and the pope’s own verbal slip-ups.
One of the challenges in covering Francis is that he frequently speaks in incomplete sentences, particularly in the free-wheeling—and often problematic—interviews he grants to the press. Explaining Francis’s teachings in their proper context, therefore, is like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle—because he says so many things, about a particular subject, at different times, and with different emphasis. But Hoopes has done an admirable job tracking down Francis’s most important statements, and bringing them together to provide a coherent summary of his teachings.
Regarding the pope’s much-discussed views on the economy, for example, Hoopes immediately puts to rest the notion that Francis is a crypto-Marxist who despises every aspect of the free market. In fact, as Hoopes documents, Francis’s views are rooted in the Gospel and the Church’s rich body of social teachings and these are “not just focused on bettering the material needs of the poor,” but addressing the needs of rich and poor alike. …