The Germans now seem the primary example of this [institutional-maintenance type] - which is another reason to scratch the head at their seeming determination to force the whole Church to adopt the Catholic Lite approach that has, in a bizarre inversion, emptied German churches of congregants while vastly expanding the German Church's bureaucracies.

The short-term impact is that people are encouraged to give the Church another look. It's up to the liveliest parts of the Church - the dynamically orthodox parts of the Church - to seize that opportunity.

[Pope Francis] has felt the mercy of God in his own life and wants to share that experience with others.

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.

The pope [Francis] speaks with great passion about the shame we should all feel when, as he puts it, "a man does not have the dignity of earning bread for his family," but is turned into a peripheral person, a welfare client, a dependent.

The Church in the United States turned a corner about three decades ago, and the idea that we're going back to the incoherence of the late Sixties and Seventies is, frankly, silly. Let's have a little faith in what the Holy Spirit has done among us these past 35 years.

The emphasis on the "peripheries" is also a distinctively "Franciscan" way of expressing the pope's respect for untutored popular piety - a respect, I might add, that was shared by St. John Paul II.