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.

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 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 colossal mess in Vatican finances that [Pope] Francis inherited has been cleaned up, and cleaned out. Real budgeting and accounting procedures are in place; so are real professionals, not somebody's nephew.

When climate change gets some attention in a 100-page document, the most important parts of which will have to do with the theology of stewardship and the theology of "human ecology," it's almost certainly going to be rapturously embraced, or bitterly opposed, as a "global-warming encyclical," despite the evidence that it's much more broadly gauged than that.

[Pope Francis] has felt the mercy of God in his own life and wants to share that experience with others.

The "encounter" with the people on the peripheries is intended to draw them into the circle of common care and concern - that call to encounter is, to use a favorite world of John Paul II's, a call to solidarity. And that means, it seems to me, aggressive Catholic efforts to empower the poor - and a profound Catholic challenge to all those cultural forces that are eroding stable families, which are the elementary schools where we learn to take responsibility for our lives, which is the highest exercise of freedom.