Isn't the new Pope great? He calls to cancel his newspaper delivery all by himself instead of getting an altar boy to do it! But more importantly, he named himself after a saint who cared deeply about the poor, which means that he's going to make the Catholic Church less about chastising others and more about taking care of the impoverished. Why, just look at his first address to diplomats from around the world, as reported in Catholic World Report, where he says he does care about the poor...

... But there is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples.

And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace is everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

The love affair with Pope Francis may continue for a while, but rest assured: This is a man who is going to continue promoting the idea that gay people and women are not quite human in God's eyes. He is not going to fundamentally transform the church or even change course in any significant way. The only question I have is whether the illusion of change is going to be enough to convince the media to forgive the church for its institutionalized pedophilia and ongoing hypocritical war against homosexuality and birth control.