If there was one thing the Peruvian-Barcelona writer Santiago Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) was clear about when, a few years ago, he began researching for the book The Shepherd and the Wolves – which Seix Barral has just published – it was that the American priest Robert Francis Prevost did not go to the Peruvian town of Chulucanas in 1985 “to prosper, to be important within the Church, or to live well.” The author of this very personal biography about the Pope, in which echoes of Carrère and Cercas resonate, intersperses painful episodes from his own life – such as the abuse he suffered from a priest at his school – others from the life of Saint Augustine, investigates the meaning of faith in today’s world, and makes revelations about Prevost’s relentless fight against mafias and abusers, even bringing to light some secrets of the conclave that elected Leo XIV as Francis’s successor.
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“I was educated in the Christianity of liberation theology – says Roncagliolo, sitting on a quiet terrace on the main street of S’Agaró, where he spends his summers – and I wanted to explain, beyond how someone goes from the bishopric of Chiclayo to Pope in just two years, the story of all these priests from a very social tradition, many of them killed by dictatorships. But when I started investigating Prevost’s life, what appeared to me was a thriller and, at the same time, a lot of memories and traumas from my own life began to emerge. It turned into a very unexpected book, it was a very unusual personal transformation process.”
“Priests and writers seek a meaning to life”
When Roncagliolo first told in Peru about the molestations he suffered as a child from Father Jaime, it sparked a wave of criticism… against himself. “I didn’t understand it, because I was the victim, but then I saw that sexual abuse is a crime with many accomplices and perpetrated by people who love you or say they love you, who very likely believe they love you, under the protection of all the other people who love you. When you accuse a priest of having abused you, you also accuse the school, the family that took you to that school, and the classmates who didn’t protect you. It’s easier for all of them to think the victim is to blame than to think their world was toxic. That created huge networks of complicity with pedophilia.”
Roncagliolo bares himself like never before in this book. “I was a completely lost boy. And I was struck by how many of the priests I interview were also lost. Some of us went towards artists, others became priests, but we were people who needed meaning. I became a writer to seek order in a world falling apart.”
“I realized – he continues – that all the victims of sexual abuse Prevost investigated had something in common: alcoholic, sick, distant, broken father figures. And what the Catholic Church offers you is a father. Essentially, God is that. So my own story with my father was the best way to explain it.” Roncagliolo addresses his father’s alcoholism – who, much later, would become a minister – as well as the beatings he gave him and his mother. “From there I could tell something valuable to understand what faith is.”
The issue of paternal mistreatment appeared, fictionalized, in his first collection of stories, Growing Up Is a Sad Job (2003). “My father got furious. I told him: ‘What do you want, for me to write about kittens? This is the life I’ve had, I’m not even using your name.’ And he replied: ‘I don’t care if you use my name, but wait until I die.’ And it took 20 years for that to happen, covid killed him, and those were the best 20 years of our relationship, the years of reconciliation. He felt very guilty for what he had been… but he changed and asked for forgiveness, and I was able to forgive. All that is very Christian too.”
The Shepherd and the Wolves reads like a thriller, with mafias, investigators, even deaths… “This Pope dealt with the dark side and, as he fought against sexual abuse, he himself was accused of covering up a sexual abuser who had been his friend and whose complaint did not prosper. A great suspense was imposed on me as well: is this man good or bad? Are we facing a hypocrite or someone devoted to others? I wanted to believe in Prevost. I approached this book at a time in my life when I already believed in very few things, and suddenly I found these missionaries, people who give their lives to others, they moved me with their generosity, doing things that I (a living room progressive) can’t even imagine. I believe that, in the end, the protagonist is good, but good does not exist like in superhero movies: you can do good and there can be victims.”
Prevost also investigated several religious who embezzled money and was relentless with them. He conducted a thorough search for irregular income in bank accounts and, with the documentation in hand, met with them. “According to some sources, he threatened to send them from altar boys to Tanzania. He has not hesitated to excommunicate, remove, or denounce the rotten apples, like when he arranged for Francis to meet alone with journalists investigating sexual abuse cases in the Peruvian Church. His hand does not tremble and, for that reason, the previous Pope took him to Rome and placed him in the line of succession.”
The author reveals that, at one point in his life, he wanted to be a priest. He also narrates an episode from his childhood: “I suffered night terrors every night, and the tense situation at home did not allow me to seek comfort from my parents. Until a priest I told about it said to me: ‘God can handle any of those freaks you fear.’ So I asked Him for help… and it worked, I began to sleep peacefully. And that is faith, a shield against fear. The world is always stranger, darker, and more sinister than we think. And believing there is something stronger that tends to good is something we need to live… even if you don’t call it God.”
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Roncagliolo also returned to attending Mass “because I try to connect with all this. I wouldn’t say I have seen the light and that I am a believer, but I do believe that the things I have connected with are very important: protecting yourself from fear, relieving pain, having a community, a meaning, these are things you can seek outside Catholicism. But they are not things you can do without. And they are things that rationalism and capitalism have made us forget.”
For the author, there are two churches, “two opposing ways of understanding God between the Old Testament and the New. It can be this bearded man who watches you and punishes you, or this divinity that incarnates in suffering people and forces you to serve. That generates the two Catholic currents.”
Prevost’s enemies in the book – besides criminals of various kinds – are groups and some conservative religious, like Ricardo Coronado or the Opus Dei archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani, with whom Mario Vargas Llosa also occasionally debated. “These people – the biographer opines – are the work of John Paul II, who was Polish and terrified of communism, he had reasons for that, and so he favored orders that did not get involved in social issues, that did not talk so much about the poor, but about the family, a more comfortable topic, they were groups that also sought their followers among the richest.” An atmosphere in which several abuse cases germinated: “There is more sex in the Church than we would like, and the very repressed will only have it with those who will keep the secret, like the disciples. And if your disciple is from a high class, where the secret drags an entire society, he will keep it much more. And then, to keep this boy you abused happy, you will promote him and he will start doing the same with other boys. The scandals, hundreds of cases, are like that: Father Karadima, the Legionaries of Christ, the Sodalitium…. Benedict resigned because he could not control this, and Francis’s project and now Leo’s is to regain control over these people, sometimes dissolving groups, other times sanctioning.”
Confession is a creepy sacrament: telling someone what you do wrong is giving them a power that, in fact, was used by abusers, children gave their intimacy to monsters. But, if not perverted, an examination of conscience is very useful”
The final part of the book reveals substantial episodes of the conclave, among whose participants are some of Roncagliolo’s sources. “I thought about how incredibly lost the entire press was – he says – all talking about Parolin, when he had no chance at all and no one talked about those closer, like Prevost. I narrate a fierce power struggle, but also the hope and effort of everyone to cancel the battles, because the Church was close to schism at some point.”
Among those internal struggles are maneuvers to tarnish Prevost’s reputation upon detecting that he has chances to be the new Pope. “They promote investigating his friend so that photos of them together appear, celebrating Mass and other testimonies of their friendship.”
There are intense scenes, for example when the author confesses. “I only did it that one time – he explains –. I felt that certain things were not wrong to examine. Confession is a creepy sacrament: going and telling someone what you do wrong is giving them a power that, in fact, was used by abusers, because these children gave their intimacy to monsters. However, if it is not perverted, the idea that you think about what you do wrong and what you can do better is something that wouldn’t be bad. I have not confessed again but I have continued doing examinations of conscience and I think my family appreciates it. God, I don’t know, but my family does notice it.”
There appear, for example, bankers convicted of fraud, like Cardinal Becciu, who, however, could not serve the sentence “because there are no prisons in the Vatican. And there he remains. Vatican legality is madness from the point of view of a modern system. The Church does not repeal laws, it simply legislates one day the opposite of what there was, and the old laws are forgotten. Because no one can contradict the previous Pope. Fundamentally what happens is that the Vatican is not a democracy, it is the last absolute monarchy of the West, and what the boss says is done, and then it will be settled with God. This is the principle The infallibility of the Pope, which seems absurd to us if we believe in a normal democracy, is not so much a dogma of faith as a legal principle. He does not make mistakes, because if he makes mistakes, the system is impossible.”
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