I finally got round to watching Conclave last week. Two hours of Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini in Oscar-nominated performances alongside Lucian Msamati and a stray papal turtle. The scandals. The tension. The outfits (also nominated). A sublime experience.
On the way home from the cinema, I became lost in background reading. “How much do we know about real conclaves controversies?” I jabbed into Google. “How close was the film’s pope to the current pontiff, Francis?” As I soon realised, the real Vatican is frequently stranger than fiction. Take Wake Up!, for example, Pope Francis’s progressive rock album (no, really) which was released in 2015.
More surprises are in store in his autobiography, Hope, which was published this week. It’s the first time a pope has written a memoir. As explained by our reviewer, the appropriately named historian of the Catholic church Professor Liam Temple, we’ve never known this much about the pontiff before. We learn that young Francis was an avid football and basketball fan, for example. But also, that he’s now a deeply remorseful man, often impatient and periodically anti-social.
