The story wafts across the Atlantic, where it's picked up with glee by Catholic progressives and horror by some Catholic conservatives - and the battle of the blogs is on, full blast. No one bothers to ask whether there's any basis in fact for the assertion that this is going to be a "global-warming encyclical."

The only future is intentional Catholicism, evangelical Catholicism.

When media "narratives" about [Pope] Francis get set in concrete, and act as filters bending or distorting (or ignoring) aspects of his vision and his teaching that don't fit the established story line, the Church has a problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.