Franco provides a fascinating look at the modern Catholic Church as he chronicles his life as a kid growing up in the Bronx, his Pastoral education In Rome and steady rise in the Vatican hierarchy. He tells some great stories about the church’s inner workings, and about each of the six popes he worked under. A warm, candid and entertaining read.

An excellent memoir from a priest who served at the Vatican and was secretary to Fulton Sheen. Educated in Rome & at Vatican II, he had a ringside seat at many great events & knew these popes. Happily the book stays mostly free of controversy, instead focusing on personal memories. Unhappily, when it comes to the current pontiff about all hew has to say is on his politically motivated actions, with which many disagree, It spoils an otherwise excellent book.

2 stars

This book is interesting, but would benefit from serious editing. The narration rambles, gets sidetracked, & there is a constant litany of “more on that later” that distracts from the topic being discussed. It reads like an early draft of a memoir that does have potential in terms of content.

[What I liked:]

•Franco has definitely had an interesting life. He has also met some interesting people, including Padre Pio and, as the title infers, a few popes. His very long career during an era of societal changes & significant reforms in the RC church also gives him a unique perspective on events.

•Franco’s perspective & life goals were shaped by diverse influences, including his socialist Italian immigrant Father & his childhood in NYC, studying at seminary in Rome soon after WWII, rubbing shoulders with all sorts of dignitaries & eminent church leaders, pastoral work as a parish priest, & academic research in theology, sociology, & economics. It was interesting to see how Franco viewed how all those factors played out in shaping him as a person.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•I’m not a fan of the prose. It’s not smooth, it’s wordy, & could use some line editing. It sort of reads like an early draft.

•The narrative rambles, goes on tangents, & gets lost sometimes in seemingly irrelevant details (details that aren’t well connected to the broader narrative). It was hard to follow the story at several points because the timeline & events kept jerking back & forth. Re-structuring the book could really help make it more cohesive & easier to follow.

•I don’t mean this is a mean way, and it’s a halfway unfair criticism since this is a memoir so the writer’s subject is obviously himself, but Franco comes across as a bit self-important. It might be due to a lack of editing to smooth out the prose, but so many sentences start with “I”, & there are frequent insertions into the anecdotes alluding to Franco’s future accomplishments & the status & respect he would later achieve. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve admiration, it just felt unnecessarily frequently emphasized & thus got annoying.

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

I received an advance copy of, Six Popes, by Hilary C. Franco. I love reading book about Catholics, and this is a great one. Monsignor Hilary C. Franco, has a great story to tell.

This book came as a surprise, as when Fulton Sheen was mentioned, I presumed that this was merely a reprint of some ancient clerical memoir, a paean to a long-gone American Catholic age. In reality, this is the memoir of a priest who by luck (or providence) from his earliest postings, served firstly as an assistant to Bishop Fulton Sheen, then to Curia in Rome, to Washington DC, to the United Nations, and finally back to his home diocese in New York.

And this is primarily a memoir - a 'treasure trove of memories as he says - far more than an autobiography, for in many ways most details of priest himself, his friends and his family are absent. Instead, we get a ground-floor, behind-the-curtain view of some of the significant moments in American Catholic history - particularly, the death of the Kennedy's, the attempted assassination of John Paul II, and his encounters with Padre Pio and Mother Teresa, later to be raised to the altars.

Much of Catholic history tries to mark a dividing line at Vatican II, and it came as a relief to find this was not the case. This book 'the story of this son of the Church' is the rather surprising story of the continuity of the Catholic faith across eight decades, because in the background, between the memories and recollections, there is a prevailing concern for the people of the parish, for the poor, for the those in the developing world.
However, the author does present Vatican II as that moment when the 'broadened Her horizons, opening Her arms,' and he evidently sees much of his ministry as flowing from that vision of 'aggiornamento'. The author was a theological assistant (peritus), alongside Fr Joseph Ratzinger at that very Council. (Indeed, after so many years of reading Church History I'd never previously understood that the Council only ran for three months a year.)

If the text has perhaps a rose-tinted element to it, the author admits that he was born into a different time, and into a different church, long before the crisis of vocations and the wave of sexual abuse scandals. The Cold War's spectre hangs over this book, and there is little mention of the secularism and relativism that has become the present burning issue in evangelistic thought. The optimism of the United Nations may seem old fashioned now, but it was still young and new in the formation of this priest, and he sees his very international work in Rome as being a complement to this international vision.

The text could have very easily been a tedious recollection of 'bishops I've known and worked with' - a staple of the trade - but there is a real lightness of touch as he moves through the decades and back and forth across the Atlantic. The author's optimism for the world evidentially flows from his faith, as he puts it - that God loves us and will never abandon us.

In a dreary and exhausting time, this was an unexpectedly heart-warming read.