Pope Francis has marked his 88th birthday with revelations that he almost did not live to see it.
According to excerpts from his upcoming autobiography, suicide bombers planned to attack him during his 2021 visit to Iraq, but were killed before striking.
Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Tuesday ran passages from Hope: The Autobiography, written with Italian author Carlo Musso, which is being released in more than 80 countries next month.
The New York Times ran other excerpts on Tuesday, Francis’s 88th birthday.
In the Italian excerpts, Francis recalled his historic March 2021 trip to Iraq, the first by a pope.
Covid-19 was still raging and security concerns were high, especially in Mosul. The devastated northern city had been the headquarters of so-called Islamic State militants, whose horrific reign had largely emptied the region of its Christian communities.
According to the book, British intelligence informed Iraqi police as soon as Francis arrived in Baghdad that a woman wearing explosives was heading towards Mosul and was planning to blow herself up during the papal visit. “And that a truck was heading there fast with the same intention,” Francis says in the book.
The visit went ahead as planned, albeit under tight security, and became one of the most poignant of all of Francis’s foreign trips. Standing in the wreckage of a Mosul church, he urged Iraq’s Christians to forgive the injustices against them by Muslim extremists and to rebuild.
In the book, Francis said he later asked his Vatican security team what became of the suicide bombers.
“The commander replied laconically ‘They’re no longer here’,” Francis writes. “Iraqi police had intercepted them and made them explode. This struck me as well: even this is the poisonous fruit of war.”
The book, originally planned to be published after Francis’s death, is coming out at the start of the Vatican’s Holy Year, which Francis will officially inaugurate on Christmas Eve.
According to Italian publisher Mondadori, Hope is the first autobiography published by a pope.
Francis has published other first-person, memoir-style books and book-length interviews with biographers and journalists, including Life: My Story Through History, published earlier this year.
