The Name of God Is Mercy by Pope Francis; Francis by Jimmy Burns review – the world’s most powerful voice against neoliberalism?

The popular and charismatic pope has proved to be passionate about social justice, but the story of his rise to power is not straightforward

A competent tango dancer and lifelong football fan who was “a little devil” at school, Pope Francis is not one’s conventional idea of a supreme pontiff. One of the several contradictions about him is that he is a Jesuit who behaves like a Franciscan. The Jesuits, despite their ascetic cult of military-style discipline, are for the most part a suave, worldly wise bunch – diplomats, administrators and intellectuals whose society was founded to defend Catholic orthodoxy against reformist zeal. They would be unlikely to find God in a sparrow, manual labour or the simple life, as a Franciscan would.

Despite being brought up within this spiritual aristocracy, Francis behaves like a plebeian, discarding the red shoes and decorative shoulder cape of his predecessors and shunning the Vatican’s magnificent Apostolic Palace for a more modest dwelling. He has also condemned the Vatican court, with its Byzantine intrigues and gross financial corruption, as “the leprosy of the papacy”. During church ceremonies, he has washed the feet of young prisoners and Muslim women in a gesture of humility, and when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires he travelled by public transport and sent his priests out to work in the slums.

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