Dan Hitchens has a great piece in First Things, reflecting on Pope Francis’s legacy ten years into his papacy.
Hitchens writes:
For a while, in those heady early days, the explanation looked simple enough: He was a rough-and-ready orthodox Jesuit, a veteran of real pastoral work in the hard-as-nails barrios of Buenos Aires, who was prepared to take risks and make provocative statements in the service of the gospel. He accepted the Church’s harder doctrines unquestioningly and proclaimed them unflinchingly, but he saw that they might go unheard unless they were preached with true radicalism: the radicalism of Jesus Christ, who dined with tax collectors and prostitutes, who shocked the respectable religious people of his day with his outrageous words, who lived among the poorest of the poor and made their life his own.
Well, that would have been nice. But it does not come close to describing the last ten years.