[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.

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.

Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses - or with a new set of ideological filters.

There's an obvious investment in some media circles in the "narrative" of "the pope who's finally going to get with it."

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.

[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.

Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes.