As Pope Takes Risks, Changes to Church Loom

In a remarkably short amount of time — from the first days after his election, really — Pope Francis has made his pontificate a vessel for religious hopes that many of his admirers didn’t realize or remember that they had.

Some of this admiration reflects the specific controversies he’s stirred within the church, the theological risks he’s taken in pushing for changes that liberal Westerners tend to assume Catholicism must eventually accept — shifts on sexual morality above all, plus a general liberalization in the hierarchy and the church.

When people say, “He makes me want to believe again,” they aren’t usually paying close attention to the battles between cardinals and theologians over whether his agenda is farsighted or potentially heretical. Nor are they focused on his governance of the Vatican, where Francis is a reformer without major reforms, and a promised cleanup may never actually materialize.

What people respond to from this pope, rather, is the iconography of his papacy — the vivid images of humility and Christian love he has created, from the foot-washing of prisoners to the embrace of the disfigured to the children toddling up to him in public events. The pope has a great gift for gestures that offer a public imitatio Christi, an imitation of Christ.

To be a critic of such a pope, then, is to occupy something like the position of George Orwell, who said of Mohandas Gandhi: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” Except that