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The papacy has existed for 2,000 years, but popes’ influence on the world stage has varied dramatically in that time.

Hope: The Autobiography, Pope Francis, trans. Richard Dixon, Random House, 320 pp., $32, January 2025

Medieval pontiffs spoke with the self-assuredness of leaders who claimed authority over kings and emperors and expected them to obey. By the first half of the 20th century, however, the pope’s clout had shrunk dramatically. While Benedict XV had spoken out against World War I before, he didn’t dare rebuke the governments involved until three years into the conflict; when he did, he wrote a letter condemning “useless slaughter” and sounded almost apologetic for his interference.

Popes have regained confidence since then, with charismatic figures such as John XXIII and Paul VI reclaiming the right to, if not give orders to world leaders, at least try to point them in the right direction. Hope, Pope Francis’s new autobiography, follows in this canon. The book reads like the pontiff’s effort to make his voice heard in a world that is moving further away from everything he stands for.

In this handout image provided by the Greek prime minister’s office, Francis meets migrants at the Moria detention center in Mytilene, Greece, on April 16, 2016. Andrea Bonetti/Greek Prime Minister’s Office via Getty Images

Francis has made the plight of migrants fleeing war and poverty the flagship issue of his papacy, urging governments to adopt “humane” policies and labeling the refusal of aid to migrants a “grave sin.” He has lamented the failures of laissez-faire capitalism and sounded the alarm on issues such as global warming and economic inequality. The pope has reached out to gay Catholics and fought other difficult battles within the church, such as expanding the role of women and allowing faithful who have divorced and remarried to receive communion.

A note at the end of the book explains that Hope was originally intended to be published after Francis’s death. But the pope decided to bring the book’s publication forward due to “the circumstances of this moment.”

A week after Hope hit shelves in mid-January, Donald Trump was inaugurated as U.S. president for a second term after pledging to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and “drill, baby, drill.” One of his first steps was to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, just as he did during his first term. He has also frozen virtually all United States-sponsored overseas aid programs.

On the other side of the Atlantic, populist and often xenophobic parties are thriving, too. The post-fascist government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is seeking to intercept migrants at sea and send them to newly built detention centers in Albania. Far-right parties are members of power-sharing coalitions in the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden; have become the largest force in the Austrian parliament following elections last September; and are on course to make historic gains in Germany’s upcoming elections. Meanwhile, a spate of conflicts that Francis has called “piecemeal” World War III rage from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Francis hugs a young refugee from Ukraine as he presides over the Children’s Courtyard in Vatican City on June 4, 2022. Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images

In the face of this bleak picture, Hope doesn’t simply dwell on Francis’s past but also weighs in on the present. Francis defends what he calls the “right to migration” in addition to warning about climate change and the exploitation of poor workers.

Some of the pages devoted to war—including a call to “Bring an end to the noise of weapons. Think of the children”—can come across as generic. But the pope doesn’t shy away from sharper, more controversial language about armed conflict. He calls a “barbarity” both Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel and Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza in response. He also labels Israeli snipers’ killing of Palestinians in Gaza as “terrorism.”

Hope includes a detailed account of Francis’s early life, providing insights into the origins of his values. The book opens by describing the 1927 shipwreck of a passenger boat full of Italian migrants headed for South America, hundreds of whom drowned in the incident. Francis’s grandparents, who were from northern Italy, bought tickets for the voyage before postponing their journey to Argentina at the last moment.

The pope uses that tragedy, a frequent conversation topic in his family, to underscore how deeply the plight of migrants has always resonated with him. He dwells on his immigrant origins; the diverse and multi-religious Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires that he grew up in; and the Peronist and socialist circles he took part in as a teenager.

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In this undated photograph courtesy of the Jesuit General Curia in Rome, Jose Mario Bergoglio (top row, second from left) poses with his family in Buenos Aires. via Getty Images

Except for a few pages on the conclave that elected him pope, Francis does not illuminate what really goes on in the Vatican’s corridors of power. Instead, a book branded as an autobiography has the unfortunate tendency to turn into a sermon on topics ranging from accepting failure to maintaining a sense of humor. Chapters bear titles such as “The Gifts of a Healthy Restlessness” and “Like the Branch of the Almond Tree.”

Luckily, the pope adds personal flair to these homilies. Readers learn about Francis’s passion for pizza, tango, and soccer. A Swiss guard brings him a printout of the Argentine league scores every week so that he can keep tabs on his beloved team, San Lorenzo, without relying on television, which he virtually stopped watching in 1990 after stumbling upon a lewd scene. Perhaps more surprisingly, given his trademark warmth in public, it turns out that Francis hates parties. And at one point, in the chapter about the conclave, he hints at his anxiety about the possibility of being elected pope, referring to it as “the danger.”

Such frankness is to be expected from a pope who once said that anyone who offends his mother should brace for a “punch” and regularly calls on young people to “make a mess.” But the book is much less direct when it comes to more controversial issues involving the church, which Francis glosses over or ignores.

The pontiff brushes off the role that Argentina’s Catholic clergy played in the Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw tens of thousands of left-wing activists and unionists killed by the country’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship, in just one paragraph. He also does not mention the accusations of collaboration that have been leveled at him; between 1973 and 1979, Francis was the most senior member of Argentina’s Society of Jesus, or Jesuits.

Similarly, Francis’s whole discussion of clerical sex abuse scandals—which have ravaged the church for decades—clocks in under three pages. The passage includes generic condemnations and requests for forgiveness but hardly mentions the concrete steps that Francis has taken to tackle the problem, such as declassifying internal documents and making it mandatory to report suspicions of sexual offenses to church authorities. Nor does the pope address the criticism that he has been the target of—including for allegedly failing to react to certain incidents and siding with the accused rather than the victims in multiple cases.

Francis also ignores the larger conflict that runs deep within the church, where a traditionalist right-wing faction has pushed back hard against the pope’s more progressive approach. He only briefly writes that the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative apparatus, has put up “the greatest resistance to change.”

Francis meets Israeli President Shimon Peres (left) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for a prayer at the Vatican Gardens on June 8, 2014.Franco Origlia/Getty Images

For all their pleas for peace, popes have a poor track record in stopping armed conflicts—whether it was Benedict XV’s letter during World War I or Paul VI’s condemnation of the war in Vietnam. Francis is no exception. But as he dwells on his diplomatic efforts to put an end to the fighting in Ukraine or the unprecedented 2014 Middle East peace prayer he organized at the Vatican—attended by then-Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—the pontiff comes across as a leader eager to intervene directly in some of the biggest international crises of our time.

Although it is not mentioned in his book, Francis also played an important role in facilitating a thaw between the United States and Cuba that culminated in the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 2014. And in January, Havana released hundreds of prisoners as part of a Vatican-mediated deal that it reached with Washington shortly before Trump took office.

The pope isn’t afraid of political confrontation, especially on immigration. In 2016, Francis argued that Trump was “not a Christian” over his pledge to build a wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico; the day before Trump’s inauguration in January, the pontiff slammed his mass deportation plans as a “disgrace.”

Francis speaks with U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump at the Vatican on May 24, 2017.Evan Vucci/AFP via Getty Images

U.S. bishops have also entered the fray, clashing with Vice President J.D. Vance—who is Catholic—over his criticism of the church’s work to support immigrants. This week, Francis published a letter supporting the U.S. bishops. “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church … not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” he wrote.

Far from a generic call for Christian compassion, Hope is an explicit rebuke of what Francis calls “distorted populism” and “extreme nationalism,” and of all those who consider immigration to be an invasion that must be tackled with sealed ports, concrete walls, and detention camps.

It’s hard to imagine any government radically changing its policies because of the pope’s rebukes. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, the West’s right-wing turn makes the Vatican’s voice stand out more. It “creates a moral space in which Francis can play a significant role,” Giovanni Filoramo, a retired professor of history of Christianity at the University of Turin, told Foreign Policy.

In the years between the two world wars, another time of rampant nationalism, satirists drew cartoons of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini gagging then-Pope Pius XI to stop him from saying things that the fascist regime might not condone. Today, the pontiff’s voice again appears out of step with trends in global politics. But Francis does not intend to be silenced.