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If you really want to understand Pope Francis, this is the book for you.
It’s a beautiful vision of how the world could emerge from the trauma of Covid, but it’s more than the Pope giving us a succinct version of his recent encyclical. It gives us a true seat in the ring of his spirituality and how a shepherd who wants to smell like sheep, his heart beats for the billion flocks he leads.
Anyone familiar with the words of Pope Francis will recognize the usual themes of his thoughts on economics, politics, and ecology. But the book is also full of fascinating personal insights. I was especially amused by how I used to think a few years ago that the Brazilian bishops were exaggerating when they talked about the problems in the Amazon.
We learn how his passion for creation, it seems, is based on his prayerful reflection on experiences like meeting people at the sharpest end of environmental degradation and listening to their pain and struggle for survival.
For the Pope, Covid is kind of a defiant Kairos moment, or to use less grandiose language when you are knocked off your horse like Saint Paul. Pope Francis sees the trauma of the virus as a call to conversion for the world, society, the Church, and our own personal journeys of faith.
He likens it to being sent off at a soccer game, and how sitting on the sidelines gives you plenty of time to reflect.
He gives some wonderful examples from his own lived experience based on the “three Covids” in his own life and how these “purifying” experiences shaped man.
I will not go into details, as it would spoil the joy of what you have to share.
We also learn from his own inner thoughts after the hotly contested synods on the family and his thought processes on the Amazon Synod and calls to relax priestly celibacy.
Latest news: the Pope believes that everything the Church does should be based on prayer.
This is not the Pope Francis of the flowery fantasies of self-righteous Catholic bloggers, but a true pastor we saw in his prime interceding alone in a deserted St. Peter’s square on a rainy March night.
That same event inspired papal biographer Austen Ivereigh to embark on a series of interviews that have provided us with this remarkable book.
In his postscript, Austen writes that those close to the Pope say that in the confinement he felt “energized” by what he saw as a threshold moment and the movement of spirits beneath its surface.
For this reader, Let Us Dream has “energized” me in my appreciation of this papacy.
Let Us Dream is a publication of Simon & Schuster; For more details and to order, see: www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Let-Us-Dream/Pope-Francis/9781398502208
Tags: Let’s dream, Pope Francis, Austen Ivereigh
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