The box lay on the table. ‘Everything is in here,’ the man in white said in a thick German accent. ‘I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people,’ he continued, ‘now it’s your turn.’ His interlocutor, also clad in white, listened intently.

This isn’t the opening scene of a gangster film. It’s what happened when Pope Francis met with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, as related by Francis himself in his autobiography, Hope. The date was 23 March 2013. Benedict, then eighty-five, had resigned the papacy a month before. Plagued by poor health, overwhelmed by revelations of paedophilia and graft in the Catholic Church, the German pontiff could no longer bear his cross. To help his successor, he had his aides stuff a box with documents relating to ‘cases of abuses, corruption, dark dealings’. When Francis came to pay his respects, Benedict presented him with the box. Talk about a welcome pack for a new job.

Fast-forward to 2025. Francis, now eighty-eight, still sits on the throne of St Peter. Unlike his predecessor, who died at the end of 2022, he looks at ease. Being pope agrees with him. And he clearly feels proud of his pontificate. No pope had ever released an autobiography (Hope was written with the Italian publisher Carlo Musso). Francis had planned for the book to come out after his death. He changed his mind having declared 2025 the ‘Jubilee of Hope’. So goes the official version. A cynic, well versed in Jesuitry, would suspect there is another reason behind the volte-face. Now that Benedict has gone up to heaven, Francis seems keen to reassert his influence down here on earth.

In recent years, the pope has made moves to provoke supporters of his conservative predecessor. Take his decision in 2023 to appoint Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, an ultraliberal theologian who once wrote a book about ‘the art of kissing’, to oversee Church doctrine. It was a role Benedict himself occupied for two decades before becoming pope. Or take Francis’s decision to allow priests to bless same-sex couples. It turned conservative cardinals red with anger. Unbothered, Francis blasted them as hypocrites. ‘I don’t bless a “same-sex marriage”, I bless two people who love each other,’ he said. ‘No one is scandalised if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people, and that is a most serious sin.’

It was pure Francis: direct, impassioned, showcasing a knack for coining zingers. Readers will meet the same Francis in the pages of Hope. Full of verve, he recounts stories from his youth in Buenos Aires, painting a touching portrait of his working-­class family. Interspersed throughout are his musings on tango, football and pizza. The pontiff also pontificates about perennial favourites: the climate crisis, the injustice of neoliberalism, the scourge of militarism and the danger of populism. He evangelises too – it’s his job after all – but he never does it in a stiff or dogmatic way. He comes across as sincere about his faith and perspicacious about the world.

But the appeal of Hope – that it’s all about Francis – is also its cardinal sin. Other than in a few throwaway lines, Francis fails to provide readers with the historical context required to understand his pontificate. For that, turn to Jesus Wept, a gripping book by the American journalist Philip Shenon. It offers a sweeping chronicle of the seven popes since the Second World War, starting with Pius XII and ending with Francis. It’s rich in narrative detail and will engross both neophytes and cognoscenti.

Shenon argues that ‘the battle for the soul of the Church’ has been raging since 1958, the year John XXIII was elected. Just three months into his pontificate, John called the Second Vatican Council. Its aim: to make the Church more democratic, modernise the liturgy, build bridges with other Christian faiths and mend relations with the Jewish world. ‘I want to throw open the windows of the Church,’ John said, ‘so that we can see out and the people can see in.’ But traditionalist Catholics did everything they could to shut the windows.

Running through Jesus Wept – in parallel to accounts of successive pontificates – are the life stories of Joseph Ratzinger and Jorge Bergoglio. Long before they became Benedict XVI and Francis respectively, these two were trying to make names for themselves. Ratzinger might have ended as a conservative, but he began as a progressive. He hailed Vatican II as ‘a great church parliament that could change everything’ and slammed the Roman Curia, the Church’s governing body. It was seething with ‘baroque princes’ and beset by ‘crippling antimodern neurosis’. Bergoglio, meanwhile, played it safe. For most of his career, he was something of a clerical centrist. Today, however, the pope agrees with the young Ratzinger. ‘Those who are always looking for solutions through regulations, who tend toward doctrinal “certainty,” who search stubbornly to rebuild the lost past,’ Francis writes in Hope, ‘have a fixed and inward-looking vision.’ He makes plain his belief that ‘we still need to fully implement Vatican II’ and ‘sweep away even more the culture of courtliness’ in the Church.

It’s clear from the get-go whom Shenon is rooting for. Jesus Wept is dedicated to the memory of John XXIII. But Shenon isn’t wrong to take a side. John was a luminous man and ranks among the great leaders of the 20th century. Despite his progressive sympathies, Shenon is a fair chronicler. His analysis of Church conservatives is sharp but nuanced – more nuanced than Francis’s own: the pope diagnoses them with ‘mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties’.

Shenon only errs in his treatment of John Paul II, pope from 1978 to 2005, who is faulted for his ‘aggressive’ enforcement of ‘traditional doctrine’. There’s no doubt John Paul was dreadfully dogmatic: he attacked contraception, homosexuality and divorce. And yet, when it came to interfaith dialogue, John Paul was anything but dogmatic. In this aspect, he was like John XXIII. Shenon admits in passing that John Paul was ‘consistent in calling for closer ties between the Catholic Church and other religions’. But he fails to recognise his achievements. He doesn’t, for instance, mention that in 1986 John Paul became the first pontiff to enter a synagogue when he visited the Tempio Maggiore of Rome. ‘You are our dearly beloved brothers’, he told Jews, ‘and in a certain way one could say our elder brothers.’ John Paul went on to establish diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel. In 2000, at the Western Wall, he prayed for forgiveness for the Church’s persecution of Jews through history. With his words and actions, he did much to dampen Catholic anti-Semitism. John Paul also made overtures to the Islamic world. In 1999 he kissed a Koran. Four years later, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, he ‘tried everything, through appeals and diplomatic initiatives, to avert the new war’, as Francis rightly notes.

But a spectre haunts John Paul’s papacy: child abuse by prelates. The facts have come out gradually since the 1980s. It’s now been established that John Paul looked the other way while the Curia covered up the crimes. The failure was institutional. Benedict, after he became pope, also swept the scandals under the rug until he realised they were too big to hide. Which brings us back to the box he gave Francis in 2013.

Francis has been slow to act on the box’s contents. To be sure, he sings the right hymns in Hope. ‘With shame and repentance, the Church must seek pardon for the terrible damage that those clergy have caused with their sexual abuse,’ he writes. ‘No silence or concealment can be tolerated.’ Yet it took until 2019 for Francis to defrock Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a serial abuser. ‘I knew nothing,’ Francis pleaded. The evidence suggests he knew from at least 2013.

Alas, there’s more. The pope gave his Argentinian protégé Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta a cushy job in the Vatican after he was accused of assaulting seminarians. Today, Zanchetta is in jail in Argentina. His friend Father Marko Rupnik allegedly raped nuns. That didn’t stop Francis from inviting Rupnik to lecture at his Lenten retreat. So much for his vow ‘to take responsibility for all the evils committed by certain priests’.

In Hope, Francis makes it clear that he won’t follow in the footsteps of Benedict and resign – except ‘in the event of impediment for medical reasons’. Still, as he nears ninety, the pope must be contemplating his legacy.

So what is Francis’s legacy? He hasn’t been – as so many had hoped – a great reformer. But he has made it easier for the next pope to be one. Francis has streamlined the Curia and changed the make-up of the College of Cardinals. Almost 80 per cent of those who will vote in the next conclave were appointed by him. Many hail from the global south and share his outlook. Shenon reveals that Francis has had a premonition about his successor. He thinks he knows what name the next pope will pick. It won’t be Francis II. It will be John XXIV.