Younger theologians will continue to pursue and understand truth rather than deconstructing it, as a lot of their elders seemed to want to do.

What I hope my liberal friends (and I have more than a few) take from this pontificate is that mercy and truth are never separable in Catholic pastoral life.

The colossal mess in Vatican finances that [Pope] Francis inherited has been cleaned up, and cleaned out. Real budgeting and accounting procedures are in place; so are real professionals, not somebody's nephew.

These [conservative] people, if they're Americans, look back on the last 35 years of our ecclesial experience and take heart from that. The dramatic reform of seminaries continues. The priests and bishops who take their pastoral model from John Paul II will continue to do so, perhaps learning a lesson or two from Francis along the way - and they'll be the overwhelming majority of the Church's ordained ministers ten, twenty, thirty years from now.

The job now is to institutionalize all of that [Vatican finances], and I wouldn't bet against Cardinal [George] Pell, who hasn't shied away from contact sports since his days as an Australian-rules football star.

But ripped out of context, ["Who am I to judge?" phrase] has become an all-purpose filter through which everything else - including the pope's multiple reaffirmations of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning - gets airbrushed out of the picture.

The papacy is an impossible job. So the best thing Catholics can do for the pope is to pray for him.