Calling him ‘The People’s Pope’, Time magazine named Pope Francis its Person of the Year 2013. “For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs, and for balancing judgment with mercy,” Time said in its announcement. “What makes this pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the church.”
With a focus on compassion, the leader of the Catholic Church has become a new voice of conscience. When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the church. Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly. In his nine months in office, Pope Francis has placed himself at the very center of the conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the temptations of power.
He lives not in the papal palace surrounded by courtiers but in a spare hostel surrounded by priests. He prays all the time, even while waiting for the dentist. He has retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed-up Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his neck. When he rejects the pomp and the privilege, releases information on Vatican finances for the first time, reprimands a profligate German Archbishop, cold-calls strangers in distress, offers to baptize the baby of a divorced woman whose married lover wanted her to abort it, he is doing more than modeling mercy and transparency.
He is embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals. Asked why he seems uninterested in waging a culture war, he refers to the battlefield. The church is a field hospital, he says. Our first duty is to tend to the wounded. You don’t ask a bleeding man about his cholesterol level.
TIME contributor Howard Chua-Eoan explains in
this video why Pope Francis inspires so many people, Christians and non-Christians alike.
Source: TIME
