ATLANTIC STORM OVER THE TIBER

ATLANTIC STORM OVER THE TIBER is the authoritative inside story of the far-reaching changes in the Catholic Church under history's first New World pope, and the tensions and conflicts it is provoking in the world's oldest institution and its largest religious denomination.

Above all, it is a portrait of the man at the heart of this revolution, an iconic leader who has become a moral reference point for a world in crisis. Although it concentrates on the present, the book dips into the past of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, sketching in the key elements of his life for readers who have no knowledge of it.

Although many books have been written that presume to analyze the impact and direction of this papacy, there has until now been little insight into its inner workings. A number of journalists have packaged the fast-moving changes in narrative accounts, yet few have managed to more than glimpse the heart, or vision, at the center of the Francis pontificate. In part, this reflects Francis's own modus operandi. Working with a tight-knit group of advisers, and putting little trust in a Vatican bureaucracy he doggedly continues to reform, Francis commands a famously secretive operation impossible for outsiders to penetrate – until now.

Austen Ivereigh, the Pope's authoritative biographer, has drawn on hours of interviews with some of Francis's closest collaborators, as well as a large number of the most influential leaders of the Catholic Church across the world, to paint an unprecedented picture of the papacy's inner workings, offering the definitive inside story of the most far-reaching shake-up of the Catholic Church in the modern era. Moving deftly between intimate accounts of the inner workings of Team Francis, the past experiences and writings of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and a long-lens historical view of the tectonic shifts in the Church which the Francis papacy has let loose, ATLANTIC STORM OVER THE TIBER examines and evaluates the different forces and pressures at work, and asks the question on everyone's lips: can he succeed?

Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist, and commentator on religious and political affairs who holds a PhD from Oxford University. His work appears regularly in the Jesuit magazine America and in many other periodicals. He is well known on British media, especially on the BBC, Sky, ITV and Al-Jazeera, as a Catholic commentator.