In the Church the transformative power of the Eucharist is experienced through the dignified celebration of Holy Mass, and people are empowered for mission because of that.

Then [Catholics] owe [pope] the loyalty that is expressed in speaking the truth to him - and that puts a premium on knowing whether what you're happy about, on unhappy about, has a basis in fact, or is merely a reflection of the "narrative.

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.

I'd also hope that my liberal friends, who find in this pope a critic of what they're pleased to call "culture-warrior" Catholics, will read carefully, and ponder even more carefully, what Pope Francis had to say about the "ideological colonization" implicit in Western decadence when he was giving robust pro-life, pro-family talks in the Philippines.

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.

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.

Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible - and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto.