Restructured Promise

I can’t imagine who would not at least find him intriguing.

He wears generic brown shoes --not red Prada. He chooses not to live in the lap of luxury, but rather communally, with the other priests and cardinals.

And there he was last week—first hanging out with the kids on the beach, and then with the faithful and not-so-faithful in the streets. He entertained questions from reporters that were not pre-approved from an edited script.

And he used a word that no pope had ever used before: gay. Even more shockingly, unlike all of those who came before him, he said Who am I to judge?

He is not your archetypical papa.

And even though he closed the door to women in the priesthood (something that still makes me angry) I cannot help but think a tiny bit of fresh air has filled the room. There is a tiny bit of light coming from the threshold of the doorway. There perhaps might be some warmth from the cold.

His top down management might just renew the idle contracts of self-exiled Catholics.

And while Pope Francis might still be a fledgling, he indeed is a harbinger of flight—of restructured promise. The new pope has erased that which people loathed about the other guy—the one who “retired” of his “own volition”---the one preceding him. In fact I barely remember his name—and maybe that is a good thing. It sounded too much like been a d—k.