[Jesus Christ to Pope Francis] is the Lord with whom he speaks for hours every day in prayer. The Risen One who reached out, touched his life, and called him into mission.

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.

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

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.

But ripped out of context, ["Who am I to judge?" phrase] has become an all-purpose filter through which everything else - including the pope's multiple reaffirmations of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning - gets airbrushed out of the picture.

We're used to institutional-maintenance Catholicism, in which the institution ticks along by its own inertia and people are "born" into the Church. Francis knows that is over and done with: "Kept" Catholicism, whether "kept" by legal establishment or by cultural habit, has no future.

There's an obvious investment in some media circles in the "narrative" of "the pope who's finally going to get with it."