Actor, prisoner and cardinal launch pope’s new book

"You have to hand it to Pope Francis. Only he could have brought together a cardinal secretary of state, a prison inmate and a Tuscan comic to present his latest book..."

The speaker is Oscar-winning Italian comic Roberto Benigni, who on Tuesday was one of three people to formally launch the latest literary effort by Pope Francis, namely The Name of God is Mercy. Billed as a "conversation" between the pope and La Stampa journalist Andrea Tornielli, this most recent "pope book" examines some of the core aspects of Francis' ministry.

Benigni, however, did not pause to dwell on the subtlities of Pope Francis's teaching on the mercy of God. Rather, in his typically ebullient manner, the actor who won an Oscar in 1999 for La Vita E Bella ("Life is Beautiful") did not hide his total enthusiasm for Pope Francis, saying: "It is a wonderful thing this morning to be in the smallest state in the world with the greatest man in the world...You cannot use moderate tones when you speak of Pope Francis. He is a revolutionary, he is wonderful..."

Benigni cut an unsual figure on stage alongside Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, senior Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi and Don Giuseppe Costa, director of Vatican publishing, a point he underlined himself to the amusement of all: "Sitting here with all these chaps, I feel a bit out of place since I don't have a collar like theirs.

“It would sort of make you want to become a priest... but then, as a child, I always used to tell people that I wanted to be pope... But when I said that, people just laughed, so I decided to become a comic.”

Along with the comic and the secretary of state, Padua prison inmate Zhang Agostino Jianqing, from China, offered his own testimony about his conversion to Christianity and his belief in the mercy of God. He recalled how he had "found God" during a Via Crucis Easter celebration ceremony.

There is little that is new and much that is familiar in the pope’s new book. Author Andrea Tornielli indicates the sense of the work immediately, recounting in his introduction how he had attended Francis’s very first public mass as pope, in the little church of Santa Anna at the Vatican gates on Sunday March 17th, four days after his election.

Speaking off the cuff in the jam-packed Church, Pope Francis said: “Christ’s message is mercy. For me, and I say this with humility, that is the Lord’s most powerful message”.

In the book, the pope underlines his reservations about “scholars of the law” who “live attached to the letter of the law but who neglect love; men who only know how to close doors and draw boundaries”. He condemns pride, hypocrisy and the urge to judge others in terms of “preconceived notions and ritual purity”. Sin, he says, is “more than a stain” that can be removed by a trip to “the dry cleaner”, rather it is a wound that “needs to be treated, healed”.

Tornielli asks the pope about his celebrated "who am I to judge?" comment, made in response to a question about gays during an in-flight press conference on the way back from Brazil in July, 2013: "On that occasion I said this: 'If a person is gay and seeks out the Lord and is willing, who am I to judge that person?' I was paraphrasing by heart the catechism of the Catholic Church where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalised."

The Name of God is Mercy has been published in 86 countries in six languages – Italian, English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.