Pope Francis: The People’s Pope
They are–we always joke, they say they need about 14 years to get through training college. That’s also true, but the reason is because they learn a lot. They become experts in their fields. Nearly all of them would hold a doctorate.
So, they are kind of the intellectual elite of the church, put it that way, while the rest of us are in the fields getting on with more mundane, probably not as interesting work.
So, I think you’re right. He’s also got a great world order to tap into because he was a leader of the – -he was a provincial leader of the Jesuits in Argentina. And he had a great knowledge of the Jesuits in Latin America, and indeed, throughout the world.
So, now he’s got a body of around 18,000 people that he can tap into and say, look, I need information on this, that or the other. One of the things you’ve probably seen more recently he’s started off doing, he wrote a document on climate change.
Christopher Buck: Yes. Laudato Si’.
Father Collins: The Pope has people who are expert in this and he said, look, give me both sides of the argument. I’m not going to write the whole thing myself, but I need people to write different parts of it, and then I’ll pull it all together, I’ll get a team around me, and then I’ll put my name to it at the end so this is our way of looking at things.
And as a result, that document has become – -it’s crazy. In Ireland, it’s become a number one best seller in paperback. Now, I know it’s available in a few pages on the internet, but people are actually going out a buying a document by the Pope. Now, that’s never happened, certainly in Ireland. I don’t know about the States.
And that’s why even the book that I was working on – I’d written one book for Liturgical Press in Collegeville, Minnesota, and that’s a short 140 pages book on the Pope from his election – well, it’s actually his life story right on to his election and then through to the first two years. But, then I realized that when Dorling Kindersley gave me the opportunity of writing another book, it had to be a picture book, and we had to do something because a picture speaks a thousand words, as they say.
