Pope Francis's memoirs: The Pope reveals two assassination attempts on his life

 

 Pope Francis was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 13 March 2013 until his death. He was the first pope from the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century Syrian pope Gregory III.

Hope is a memoir by Pope Francis, the supreme prelate of the Catholic Church. It was first published by Random House on 14 January 2025, with the publisher describing it as the first memoir ever published by a sitting pope. The book is based on notes from interviews that Francis conducted with the Italian journalist Carlo Musso over six years.

According to his memoir, two attempted attacks on Pope Francis, including one by a suicide bomber, were foiled during his landmark trip to Iraq in 2021. 

The Pope says "almost everyone advised me against" the visit but he felt he "had to do it". The pope had to visit the ruins of four destroyed churches there and launched an appeal for peace. He said the plot was uncovered by British intelligence, who warned Iraqi police, and they in turn told his security detail once he had touched down.

Francis’ visit to Iraq was the first by a pontiff to the country, and was considered a very high-risk journey, both for security reasons and due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

The pope wrote that he was warned of a report by British security services that a young woman with explosives was on her way to Mosul to blow herself up during his visit. Francis added that he was told a van “had also left at high speed with the same intention.”

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 “When I asked the (Vatican) Gendarmerie the following day what was known about the two bombers, the commander replied laconically, ‘They are no longer there, the Iraqi police had intercepted them, and detonated them. That, too, was very striking to me. This, too, was the poisoned fruit of war,” he wrote in the memoir, an extract of which was published by Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera.