There is no chasm separating the liturgy and evangelization. In many ways, they can be and truly are the same cause.

Pope Francis Will Enliven 

the Benedict Legacy

by Jeffrey Tucker

Being quoted by the press often leads to an out-of-body experience. This happened to me this weekend when article posted by the Religion News Service was sent out through the wire and landed at the Washington Post, Huffington Post, National Catholic Reporter, and many other outlets. Every time I would read a new posting of this piece, I would think: who is this guy they are quoting?

The hook for the article was the now-familiar media template on Pope Francis. The line was that he is overturning all previous ways of doing things. He is embracing progress over tradition, loves the poor and not the rich, favors people over ritual, and is willing to rethink fundamental teachings and reopen the debate over moral issues.

What’s true and what’s not in this line of thinking? Very little of it is true at all. This Pope has a special style, just as ever Pope before him. The press needs a story and so it chooses a template. And that template sticks. One reporter summoned me to play my appointed role as a grumpy traditionalist who sits around grousing about Pope Francis’s popularity.

I was quoted as follows: “I’ve personally found many aspects of this papacy to be annoying, and struggled against that feeling from the beginning. I’m hardly alone in this… Every day and in every way we are being told how glorious it is that the bad old days are gone and the new good days are here.”

Wow, what a crabby guy, don’t you think? Here I am putting down this popular Pope and lamenting that things are getting better! How perverse. Except for one point, namely the whole context of the piece from which these comments were drawn. What I was lamenting was not the Pope but the media narrative and its implicit anti-Benedict bias. Fully two-thirds of my original article was devoted to explain precisely why we should not believe this narrative.

Meanwhile, the sudden wave of press attention to the supposed disgruntlement of “traditionalists” with Pope Francis—and how the press would love to drive a wedge between the issues that concern us and the seeming universal love being shown to the new Pope!—has set off an interesting round of commentary on the election itself.

What was it that drove the Cardinal electors to choose Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the new Pope?

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