In the Vatican, if you don't get something new done quickly you may not get it done at all.

The dynamically orthodox orders of religious women will continue to grow, and the dying orders, which long ago opted for the lightest of Catholic Lite, will continue to die.

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

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

Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible - and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto.

There's the trope about an impending "global-warming encyclical." The pope is preparing an encyclical on nature and the environment, including the human environment (which includes the moral imperative of a culturally affirmed and legally recognized right to life from conception until natural death). So what happens? A low-ranking Vatican official for self-promotion gives an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that this is a global-warming encyclical - which he couldn't possibly have known, as the document wasn't drafted yet.

[Pope Francis]sees a world in need of the Gospel, and of friendship with Jesus Christ, as an antidote to the self-absorption and loneliness that are eating away at the solidarity of the human community.