"Atheist," "militant secularist," and "rigorously impious" — this is how Spanish writer Javier Cercas defines himself. Yet with these credentials, he accompanied Pope Francis on a journey to the "end of the world," where they discovered a shared, provocative idea: anticlericalism. The 63-year-old author traveled with the pope to Mongolia, where he realized they had more in common than expected. Like him, Francis was "profoundly anticlerical." "Clericalism is the perverse idea that the priest is above the faithful. That, according to Francis, is the cancer of the Church," Cercas tells AFP in an interview at the Hilton Hotel in Bogota. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES