[Pope Francis] comes to that conviction [of family crisis] as a pastor, not as Brad Wilcox or Charles Murray. So he wants to challenge the Church to find pastoral responses to that crisis that meet real human needs.

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 most important appointment Pope Francis has made is the appointment of the Australian cardinal, George Pell, as the Vatican's financial overseer.

The only future is intentional Catholicism, evangelical Catholicism.

[When the Gospel seems to be interpreted in different ways] is the obvious challenge, perhaps even danger, here. By its very nature as a custodial office, the papacy can't be a Rorschach test, into which people read whatever they like - whatever they fear or hope for.

The people who are behind the curve of the Catholic future are the institutional-maintenance types.

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