Pope Francis

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I'm away at the moment with intermittent access to the internet so have not posted or commented about the Pope.  It has astonished me that so many Catholic commentators have managed to infer so many bad things about him already when all I have been able to infer are good, or in some cases different-from-Benedict things.

He is a man with a simple approach to prayer: "be silent and pray for me". His Marian understanding is central to this prayer life, not peripheral. Prayers are asked for and offered.  His understanding of liturgy - perhaps better, liturgiology - is different to what he have been used to and will probably lead a return to John Paul II's and the other Marini's style: but here is somebody who as a Bishop learned to celebrate the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.

He is as sound on Life issues as any Bishop in Christendom. As a priest he lived through a more turbulent social context in his country tnan most other Cardinals: imagine something like a cvivil war in your country in which there are priests on both sides.

He is a scientist and a Jesuit whose intellectual formation predates Vatican II. He wants to take St Francis of Assisi as his public role model, a saint whom the secular media thinks it understands, and whose misunderstanding will be used to chastise the Pope for the rest of his ministry.

I can't help feeling that the SSPX and its supporters within the Church are facing a bleak future: they won no friends to their cause by their treatment of Pope Benedict's overtures.  By forcing themselves into the centre of his pontificate and then by behaving towards him in a manner easily characterised (however wrongfully) as one of trying to humiliate the Pope, they forfeited any good will which may have remained within the upper reaches of the Church at the precise moment when the Cardinals were choosing Benedict's successor.

Both the transition from Benedictine to Franciscan Papacy and then the Franciscan Papacy itself are going to be uncomfortable for those of us for whom Pope Benedict was exactly the right Pope at the right time.  It may simply be that we should thank God for eight marvellous years, and to assume that the Holy Ghost will impel Pope Francis to do God's Will, even if the path taken isn't the one we'd have chosen.