Pope Francis

So far, into the pontificate of Francis, the one person who has best exemplified what it is to be Pope is Pope Francis.

The person who has learning to do is you and me and Fr. Zed and New Catholic and everyone else. The Pope is not learning to be Pope. He is the Pope.

He has not stumbled; he is not like a baby learning to walk. Everything he has done so far has been quite timely and amazingly effective with a certain ineffable instantaneousness; a certain quickening that is very confirming.

Just like Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address was very timely and was just what needed to be said and it was the rest of the world that was off center and off kilter and insane.

It is other people who have lost their heads and who are ignorant and who are sleepy. The Pope does not need to wake up and realize he is Pope (ala, WDTPRS?). It is us who are asleep. The evidence for that is in - in freaking spades.

It is other people (at least as far as their online manifestations) - not the Pope - who are so arrogant that they think they have the Pope figured out as they pack things beyond their comprehension into hopelessly ridiculous one-dimensional isolated categories and liturgy-as-politics, who only two months ago were peeing themselves in shock over Pope Benedict's abdication, and up to which point the name Bergoglio had never crossed their minds.

And suddenly overnight they knew everything about him, because a certain blog wished to inform everyone about how they had been "reporting" on him for years, which is to say, posting third-hand hash from a region whose church situation they clearly have not a clue about.

By the way, I've never encountered anti-semitism from a TLMer. (A TLMer? Well, that would be me once and a while. It will be nice when we can do away with these ridiculous categories.)

I have encountered it from secularists though.

And once an anti-semitic comment from a very left-liberal Mass-tinkering priest.