The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.

The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.

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

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

The papacy is an impossible job. So the best thing Catholics can do for the pope is to pray for him.

That's what the liveliest parts of the world Church today - ranging from the booming Church in Africa to FOCUS missionaries on American campuses - are living: a Catholicism that has discovered that it doesn't have a mission, it is a mission.

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.