The memorable papal trip of a “hardened atheist”
The pontiffs, with their doubly millennia-long history, are also tempting material for literature: beyond historical studies, many of those from medieval and Renaissance times (with patrons of the arts like Julius II, for example, with his tense but fruitful relationship with Michelangelo) have appeared in more than one novel. The most recent—from Pius XII to John Paul II—are the subject of biographies, although films like The Two Popes —loosely inspired by Ratzinger and Bergoglio—have successfully played with fiction in a contemporary key.
A brief historical account indicates that Alexandre Dumas, in The Borgias , helped spread the dark legend of the Spanish pope and his family. More recently, bestsellers such as Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman or Robert Harris's very recent Conclave (which also gave rise to the recent film) make it clear that intrigue and curiosity about the subject are far from extinct.
There are also novels with, let's say, more aesthetic ambitions that have placed the papal figure at the center. The most eccentric and unorthodox is Adrian VII , in which the even more eccentric Baron Corvo imagines that a brilliant but underrated writer receives a visit from a cardinal and a bishop who aspire to make him pontiff. Thomas Mann's catalog often overlooks The Chosen , inspired by a medieval epic poem about Gregory V, when these adventures contain all the irony, humor, and excesses of his late style.
As the Spaniard Javier Cercas (Cáceres, 1962) asserts in The Madman of God at the End of the World —a book that, by chance, was published weeks before the death of Francis, his dominant figure, and the election of Leo XIV, his successor—for “a hardened atheist, a stubbornly impious man” like himself, the Vatican is synonymous with dark plots and collusion, an idea that emerges from some of those novels and from History itself. That's why he's surprised to be writing a volume he would never have written if not for the unusual proposition he received in 2023 from an emissary linked to a publishing house and the Vatican press department: to participate in the imminent papal trip to Mongolia. “I'm a dangerous guy,” Cercas believes he replied, as he recalls. “But are they crazy?” the interlocutor claims the writer said.
Cercas—who says he lost his faith very early, after reading Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno Mártir , and later reading Bertrand Russell and Nietzsche—ends up accepting the invitation, convinced that no one has ever had the opportunity to write a work with access to that closed world to say whatever they want. He sets only one condition: that he be allowed to speak with Francisco for five minutes to ask him a question that will answer his nonagenarian mother, a fervent believer, convinced that she will meet Cercas's father in the afterlife. The question is about the resurrection of the body and eternal life. They don't confirm it, but they tell him they will do their best.
This question runs like a guiding thread, a productive excuse, through this chronicle, as reflective as it is dizzying, which traces Jorge Bergoglio's own life to find a key (is he leftist, is he conservative? No, Cercas concludes, he is multifaceted), in the religious springs of his papacy (why does he always appear in the news talking about politics when he talks much more about religion?). In Rome, the author embarks on a series of interviews with journalists, religious figures (such as Antonio Spadaro, then editor of the leading Jesuit magazine) and cardinals (such as the Portuguese José Tolentino de Mendonça, who is also an important poet, or the Argentine Víctor Manuel "Tucho" Fernández, about to assume what used to be the Holy Office), who give him their views on Francis. Cercas verbosely reproduces these dialogues, which seek to outline some of Bergoglio's personal traits, but also the apparent contradictions pointed out by his papacy's detractors. Cercas moves with the bewilderment of an obsessive researcher, meddling in a foreign world.
The hectic three-day stay in Mongolia allows for a classic and detailed travelogue in which the writer finds a source of astonishment in the missionaries stationed in that country with barely 1,500 Catholics. What is the reason for this tiring trip for the Pope to a place with so few faithful? Is it due to the proximity of China, as the Vatican experts on the same plane suggest? Is it due to Francis's central interest in the peripheries, in those places where Catholicism preaches against all odds? In any case, Cercas believes he discovers, all this reflects Bergoglio's anticlericalism: the idea that the clergy should never be above their flock.
The Spanish writer's style is agile and lively. He presents himself as a sort of anti-hero, "the godless madman" (a reference to the man who, in Nietzsche's The Gay Science , claimed that God was dead) who moves among the "madmen of God"—the definition, not at all pejorative, refers to missionaries—among whom Francis himself is included.
There are many threads woven into The Madman of God at the End of the World , including linguistic discussions about that word, for him, abstruse: synodality. Cercas even allows himself to write a poem in the style of Nicanor Parra's Christ of Elqui, but referring to Francis ("An all-too-human pope/ an Argentinian but modest pope/ a pope who calls a spade a spade and wine wine," say some of its verses) and also reaches what he considers Bergoglio's secret: that, after having gone through many stages, he is then a normal, ordinary man, a true Christian placed on the throne of St. Peter.
Cercas has a capacious yet precise sense of narrative tempo, as already evident in Anatomy of a Moment . If reality rushes, he doses the intrigue. Francis granted him those five minutes on the plane to Mongolia as a surprise, after having greeted each of the correspondents one by one, including himself. The meeting occurs midway through the narrative, but nothing is said about the matter. Throughout the rest of the book, his guides ask him sotto voce, without success, if he can tell them what the Pope replied to that question about the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Cercas saves the answer for last, when he shows it on film to his mother, the true recipient. That ending and its epilogue paint a picture of Bergoglio without mediation. They are, quite simply, unusual, memorable pages.
God's Fool at the End of the World
By Javier Cercas
Random House
486 pages, $32,999
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