Pilgrimage: My Search for the Real Pope Francis

Former Maryland state legislator Shriver (A Good Man) exquisitely crafts this look at the life of Pope Francis. To date, the significant biographies of Francis—including Elisabetta Piqué’s Life and Revolution, Austen Ivereigh’s The Great Reformer, and Paul Vallely’s Untying the Knots—have been written by Latin American or British authors, leaving a space for Shriver to add the democratic, liberal, and personal perspectives of American Catholicism to the pope’s story. Significantly, Shriver opens his telling in Cordoba, Argentina, in the 1990s, during what Francis called “a time of great interior crisis.” This two-year period of exile from his Jesuit order became a period of desolation of the soul that led to the conversion of Francis (then Bergoglio) from “pious patriarch” to the “gregarious shepherd” the world knows today. “How a person changes has always been the narrative that most interests me,” Shriver writes. He interviews Francis’s students and colleagues from that era, and in these interviews, readers glimpse the teología del pueblo (theology of the people) that shapes the pope today. In this excellent book, Shriver takes readers on a pilgrimage to numerous significant people and places in the life of Pope Francis. [em](Nov.) [/em]