One of the most important qualities in a pope is his judgment of people - can he get around him the people who can put into practice his vision of what the Church must be doing now to fulfill its mandate from the Lord.

The only future is intentional Catholicism, evangelical Catholicism.

[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.

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.

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.

More pro-active Vatican communications might be able to do something about all this, but when the Holy See is constantly in the mode of, "No, what the pope really meant was . . . ," the game has already been largely forfeited.

The most enduring of the false narratives is that the signature phrase of the early pontificate - "Who am I to judge?" - was a matter of the pope jettisoning millennia of Catholic moral teaching. It was not. It was a specific response to the circumstances of a man who had repented and was trying to live an upright life.