Across the world, many people are beginning to agree that Francis is a curiously unusual Pope. Some writers have pinpointed the peculiarity. To quote from the Episcopal Cafe Website,

“Pope Francis has launched nothing short of a revolution in the Catholic Church.... ‘Will he make it?’ or ‘Will he pull it off?’ ...everyone, it seems, knows that Francis is trying to engineer “a Catholic glasnost.”1 ...In the late 1980s, Soviet Union Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev elevated glasnost into policy. Linked to “perestroika” or restructuring, Gorbachev used that double-blade to curb embedded corruption in the Kremlin and communist party. Francis’ lifestyle—from lodging in spare Casa Santa Marta quarters to spurning limousines—has rippled out. Cardinals are shedding titles and crimson-laced vestments. Work patterns in Vatican institutions, from the change-resistant Curia to the troubled Vatican Bank, have radically altered.2

The Teflon and the Extraordinary Pope

Then there are metaphors used about Francis and descriptions of his actions that were never before used referring to a Pope. To quote the Opinion Inquirer Website,

“Francis as a ‘Teflon pope.’ Nothing bad sticks. ‘Francis is giving rise to a ‘new culture of accountability.’ That means somebody actually gets fired. He accepted the resignation of two Vatican Bank officials. And he did not shield Msgr. Nunzio Scarano of the Vatican Bank from a $30-million laundering charge. Francis seeks to enhance the role of the layman—not just in ceremonial ways, but in the nuts and bolts of reforming and governing the Church. And he is repositioning the Church in the political center, after a lengthy period where it drifted to the right.”3

Moreover, the Political Dog 101 Website, under the headline “Pope Francis as a Progressive Versus the Vatican,” stated the following,

“In a blog post titled ‘This Extraordinary Pope,’ Andrew Sullivan, an outspoken homosexual Catholic, expressed the sentiments of many like-minded Church members: ‘What’s so striking to me is not what he said, but how he said it: the gentleness, the humor, the transparency. I find myself with tears in my eyes as I watch him. I’ve lived a long time to hear a pope speak like that,’ Sullivan wrote. ‘Everything he is saying and doing is an obvious, implicit rejection of what came before.’


Pope Francis “Who am I to judge?” and the first pope to speak “off the cuff”


On July 29, 2013, Pope Francis spoke to reporters on his flight back from Brazil. He was asked if there was a ‘gay lobby’ in the Vatican? He allowed the issue to come up and tackled it with his own question, which has become well known, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”4 Pope Francis is very much aware that according to Catholic dogma,

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The Extreme Oath of the Jesuits