It is not easy to write a systematic treatment of Pope Francis’ thought, whether it be in its theological and spiritual dimensions, or, as in this case, the social and political. Jorge Mario Bergoglio has always been an occasional and pragmatic thinker and so very much a “moving target.” “Realities are more important than ideas,” the pope insists (Evangelii Gaudium, §231). While he certainly employs ideas, one must attend to the way that the contexts (“realities”) in which he uses these ideas inflects their meaning. These contexts are various. Bergoglio was a powerful and often controversial leader of Argentina's Jesuits in the seventies and eighties during the Dirty Wars. After that he wrote as auxiliary bishop and then archbishop of one of the world's great megacities, and increasingly as a leader of the global Catholic Church, even before his election as bishop of Rome in 2013. In the face of this complexity, Rourke's book delivers well what its title promises: the roots of the pope's social and political thought. This is no small achievement. Discerning a more systematic structure to his thought, which can help one understand the different ways Francis draws on these roots in different contexts, and has developed his thinking over time, will require a more thorough and critical probing.

Rourke's guiding principle is very helpful. The main theological root of Francis’ thought is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which has a logic that underwrites an impetus toward evangelization-by-inculturation. He became convinced early on that this impetus was paradigmatically carried through in the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay and Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their suppression by the Bourbon courts of Spain and Portugal became equally emblematic of abstract theories (in this case, of the Enlightenment) being imposed on local populations by elites in distant centers of power (an analysis that sounds suspiciously akin to the dependency theory that Rourke critiques in the first generation of liberation theologians). Rourke discerns this template over and over again: in Bergoglio's response to liberation theology in the seventies, to the neoliberal economics of the World Bank and IMF during the collapse of the Argentinian economy in 2001 and 2002, and to the technocratic mind-set that distorts our relationship to nature.

Rourke is very good on identifying and summarizing key intellectual influences on the future pope. For example, he discusses Alberto Methol Ferré on the need for the Latin American church to become a “source church” for the universal church, rather than a “reflection church” of the church in Europe, as well as Romano Guardini's work on the increasing centralization and anonymity of power in modernity and his account of the dangers of the technocratic paradigm. Rourke also understands the importance of Argentinian history and culture for the pope, and the centrality of magisterial writings—those of Paul VI in particular—on the relationships between evangelization and work for social, political, and economic development. One is thus left with a rich palette of colors from which Pope Francis paints his prophetically challenging but also hope-giving vision.

The account is largely expository and laudatory, and the lack of a more critical edge leaves the reader with questions. For example, Bergoglio's glowing portrait of the Jesuit reductions, at least as Rourke presents it, leads one to wonder whether the pope ignores his own warnings about idealizing the past rather than drawing appreciatively, but also critically, on it. What is one to make of Bergoglio's early and wooden characterizations of “Calvinism,” in comparison to his later more fully developed ecumenical sensibilities? And I found Rourke's attempt to argue that liberation theology developed away from early flawed positions (and toward the “theology of the people”) as a result of Vatican interventions and the documents of Puebla unpersuasive, particularly when it comes to Gustavo Gutiérrez. Of course liberation theology developed and deepened, but so too did the church's magisterium, taking up insights developed by liberation theology toward which it was initially suspicious. The thought of Jorge Mario Bergoglio has surely developed as well, moving away from earlier positions that strike one as often black-and-white and wooden (he himself said of the seventies, “I made many mistakes”). A further step beyond this admirable work would be to capture that development.