I’m sorry that Paul Vallely (Letters, 24 January) remains offended by my claim that his papal biography “imagines” a conversion in Jorge Mario Bergoglio during his Córdoba exile (1990-92). The word may be wrong; what I mean is that his narrative depends on a conjecture based on a false premise. No one disputes that “something major happened”: it was a searing period of sharp desolation that marked him profoundly. The question is whether it can sustain the weight that Vallely’s biography attempts to put on it, as the locus of a metamorphosis from liturgically restorationist, authoritarian Jesuit provincial uninterested in social change to a gentle, listening, merciful bishop now concerned with justice for the poor. I can’t accept this becaus