[Pope] Francis communicates the pastoral embrace of the Church, the breadth and inclusiveness of Catholicism symbolized by the Bernini colonnade around St. Peter's Square, in a powerful way.

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

The story wafts across the Atlantic, where it's picked up with glee by Catholic progressives and horror by some Catholic conservatives - and the battle of the blogs is on, full blast. No one bothers to ask whether there's any basis in fact for the assertion that this is going to be a "global-warming encyclical."

When climate change gets some attention in a 100-page document, the most important parts of which will have to do with the theology of stewardship and the theology of "human ecology," it's almost certainly going to be rapturously embraced, or bitterly opposed, as a "global-warming encyclical," despite the evidence that it's much more broadly gauged than that.

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.

[Jesus Christ to Pope Francis] is the Lord with whom he speaks for hours every day in prayer. The Risen One who reached out, touched his life, and called him into mission.

The Guardian,[is] one of the most consistently anti-Catholic newspapers in the world.