Pope Francis: The People’s Pope
He didn’t want to go into the churches. He wanted to be out at the market squares where people were. And that I think also is a key to understanding Pope Francis, because he doesn’t want to be stuck in the church where nobody is going to come. He wants to be out there.
In fact, an interesting story he told one day, he said, I wonder about the churches. Are we doing the right thing? He said, sometimes, people want everybody to come into the church and carry on the way we used to do things, but he said, times have changed. And he said, nowadays, it make more sense for us to rent a garage somewhere, set up a little chapel which is near the people so that they have far to come, and they just walk across the street, and come to their new little church which is in their neighborhood.
I think, that kind of lateral thinking, that thinking outside the box is what’s making him so attractive to people who–in particular Catholics, who would probably have seen popes in the recent past as being a little bit–well, I don’t think it’s fair to say removed because they weren’t, but they were certainly distanced. There was a separation between the popes and the people, whereas this man, you saw him in Latin America a few days ago, he went into the slums, he got his black boots all covered with mud when he went in because he went off the red carpet because the people don’t live on red carpet in the slums. He went over and he shook hands, and he was meeting people, and they were all speaking his native Spanish and they were speaking dialect.
So, it was just wonderful, and the TV coverage was amazing of that, because who would have imagined five or ten years ago a Pope choosing slum as his first place to visit instead of going to the President’s palace?
Christopher Buck: I think that’s absolutely fabulous.
