Pope Francis and Argentina: Days of penance Pope Francis: Untying the Knots. By Paul Vallely. Bloomsbury; 240 pages; £12.99. To be published in America in September; $20.95. Buy from Amzon.com, Amazon.co.uk ARGENTINA has known bloody internal strife, so an event that triggers a surge in national pride can be nicely unifying. When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, leader of the nation's Catholics, became Pope Francis, Diego Maradona, an ex-footballer and fellow national hero, spoke for many compatriots when he cracked: "The God of soccer is Argentine, and now the pope is too." But not everybody joined the applause. Some Catholics who knew him at earlier stages and bore grudges refused to participate in the chorus of approval for the "barefoot" pope. One high-ranking Hispanic churchman claimed that Father Bergoglio, who was Argentina's senior Jesuit between 1973 and 1979, used his "aura of spirituality to obtain power." Yet many old acquaintances concede that the modest style of the new pope is not some newly adopted pose, but was a central feature of his most recent job as archbishop of Buenos Aires. Paul Vallely, a British writer on religion, tries to tease out these paradoxes in a professionally, if rapidly, researched book. He presents a pope who made serious mistakes in early life but repented deeply for them. Like all churchmen in Argentina, the young Father Bergoglio faced giant moral tests during the dictatorship of 1976-83 - and the promising young cleric partly failed, in Mr Vallely's view. But that, it seems, was not the end of his spiritual story. The future pontiff's outlook changed during a period when he was far from the limelight: as a mature student in Germany in 1986, and then as a priest in the provincial Argentine city of Córdoba. By the time he re-entered high church politics in the 1990s, he was a chastened man. That raises the question of how much cause he had to feel humbled. Any assessment of the young Father Bergoglio's record leads to questions over two radical Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, who worked in the slums in Buenos Aires when the junta took power. They were seized (along with six other church people who vanished without trace) in May 1976, tortured and then released after five months. As Mr Vallely recalls, the pair had quarrelled bitterly with Father Bergoglio in the preceding months, to the point of being expelled from (others say resigning from) their religious order. The quarrel was unsurprising, Mr Vallely says, as Father Bergoglio got the senior Jesuit job while riding a wave of conservative protest against a radical predecessor. Supporters of Father Bergoglio insist that he worked tirelessly to secure the captured priests" release and so saved their lives. But the hard question is whether he left them vulnerable by withdrawing their licence to say Mass and by blocking their transfer to another parish. In Mr Vallely's view, Father Bergoglio endangered the two priests by signalling his disapproval of them in public. The family of Father Yorio, who died in 2000, still nurses hard feelings. As for Father Jalics, he is now living in Germany. Having survived his captivity by endlessly repeating the "Jesus prayer" - "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" - he has joined a closed monastic order. Although he had harsh things to say about his ex-boss in the 1990s, the two men have since had a deep personal reconciliation. Mr Vallely writes that Father Bergoglio underwent years of spiritual labour, contemplating his own sinfulness, before he was ready for this rapprochement. No biography, however diligent, can capture someone's interior life. But what this book does demonstrate is that Pope Francis is a tougher, more complex figure than meets the eye. A turbulent life has given the pontiff a subtle sense of the realities of power, and the courage to act on it. Since becoming pope in March, he has taken three separate initiatives to clean up the moral and financial corruption afflicting the Vatican. Anybody who reads this book will eagerly await his next move.