In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.

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.

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

As a friend at a major American newspaper said to me when I complained about this tendency in his own paper, "You know how these media narratives are. They're like bamboo." Meaning, once they start growing, you can't kill them.

Perhaps the dumbest of these story lines is that [Pope] Francis has re-opened conversation and debate in a Church that had been closed and claustrophobic for 35 years under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I defy anyone who, over the last 35 years, has spent time on the campuses of Notre Dame or Georgetown, or who has read the National Catholic Reporter, or who has gone to a meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, to make that claim without experiencing a twinge of conscience that says, "I should wash my mouth out with soap."

[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.

[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.