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In a previously unpublished extract from an autobiography to be published in January, Pope Francis reports that the British secret service prevented two attacks during his 2021 trip to Iraq. “The Iraqi police had intercepted [the terrorists], and blew them up,” he explains in the book, excerpts of which Corriere della Serapublished December 17, 2024.
On January 14, 2025, the autobiographySpera (“Hope”) will be published in Italian by Mondadori. Extracts from the book, written in the first person but co-written with Italian journalist Carlo Musso, were published in the New York Times and Corriere della Sera.
The American daily offers a fragment on the Pontiff’s sense of humor, and the Milanese daily looks back on his historic trip to Iraq from March 5 to 8, 2021.
A dangerous trip
The trip took place in a particularly complicated context, due in great part to the Covid-19 pandemic but also to the political and social instability in Iraq, still scarred by long years of civil war against the Islamic State group. A few weeks before the Pontiff’s visit, an attack in Baghdad killed some 30 people, raising the possibility for a time that the trip might be postponed.
In the extract published by Corriere della Sera, the Pope recounts how he was warned of real danger on the eve of his departure.
“The police had alerted the Vatican Gendarmerie of a report from the British secret services: a woman armed with explosives, a young suicide bomber, was on her way to Mosul to blow herself up during the papal visit. And there was also a van that had left at full speed with the same intentions.”
Despite the risk, the Pope went ahead with his trip because he was keen to visit the land “of our grandfather Abraham,” and because he didn’t want to disappoint the Iraqis after John Paul II’s cancelled trip in 2000.
The trip went off without a hitch. On March 7, the day after his meeting with Grand Ayattolah Ali Al Sistani, the country’s highest Shiite authority, and while still in Iraq, the Pontiff asked the Vatican Gendarmerie what had become of the two terrorists.
“The commander replied laconically: ‘They are no more.’ The Iraqi police had intercepted them and blown them up,” reports the Pontiff. This news, he explains, “impacted him deeply” and he saw it as “the poisonous fruit of war.”
Clerical humor
In the excerpts published by the New York Times, Francis speaks about humor in the Church, citing various examples.
Pope John XXIII is known for having had a flair for comedic comments. Francis quotes him as saying, “more or less: ‘It often happens at night that I start thinking about a number of serious problems. I then make a brave and determined decision to go in the morning to speak with the pope. Then I wake up all in a sweat … and remember that the pope is me.’”
He also recounts how Pope St. John Paul II, while still a cardinal, defended his athletic activities from accusations of being inappropriate for a cardinal. “But do you know that in Poland these are activities practiced by at least 50% of cardinals?” he replied, leaving unsaid the fact that there were only two cardinals in Poland at the time.
Pope Francis highlights the value of ironic humor, especially directed at oneself, “because self-mockery is a powerful instrument in overcoming the temptation toward narcissism.”
He adds that jokes “about and told by Jesuits are in a class of their own,” and goes on to tell a lengthy joke about himself.
Francis also talks about the uncomplicated sense of humor shown by children and the elderly. Some children smile when they see him, he adds, while others see his white cassock and think he’s “the doctor who has come to give them a shot, and then they cry.”
“They are examples of spontaneity, of humanity, and they remind us that those who give up their own humanity give up everything, and that when it becomes hard to cry seriously or to laugh passionately, then we really are on the downhill slope,” he concludes.
And today we celebrate...