Humble on the outside, Roman Catholic on the inside

Like all his predecessors, Pope Francis is a showman. It's unavoidable and a part of the job description. Catholicism is hugely about ritual drama, or dramatic ritual. Whether you are the Classical and Baroque type like Benedict or the International Pop(e) Star type like John Paul, or even the Kiss The Tarmac and Sell the Tiara type like Paul VI, you live in a world where gesture is one of the fundamentals of your communication portfolio.

I continue to find Francis an extravert feeling type with a consequent attraction to dramatic and emotional interpersonal interactions. His Jesuit imagination --based on the meditative techniques of the Spiritual Exercises-- is peopled with these kinds of vivid images of exchange.

Being enthroned today on his cathedra in St John Lateran
as Bishop of Rome.
(St Peter's is not his cathedral, but the shrine of the Apostle's grave)

Although his liturgical tastes are simpler than Lord Ratzinger's, his populist preaching is still quite noticeably, even vehemently, orthodox in content, His personality is very warm and direct and he likes to step --dramatically-- outside the lines there. But what he has to say, even when it is wrapped up in themes of mercy and grace and care for the poor, is absolutely Catholic, even "evangelically" so. He has called gay marriage a deceit of the Devil (whom he mentions frequently). Abortion is "a death penalty for the unborn." He leaves flowers at the altar of the Virgin. He warns against treasonously bargaining away the content of The Faith to please the world. He holds to the absolute physical reality of the Resurrection. He is a great practitioner of the now-neglected sacrament of Confession. He asserts that only Jesus can save, no one else, no one. And when he praises women as fundamental to the handing on of the Faith, it is in their roles as wives and especially as mothers. Not priests.

The media love affair with him continues for now, but media people are herd animals. It is ironic that so many of them are called "analysts", given the ham-fisted Manicheanism of their mental apparatus. I wonder how long it will be before they realize that the humble and simple new Bishop of Rome is, mirabili dictu, an unrepentant and unreconstructed Roman Catholic*.

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*Very much like his namesake, Francis of Assisi, who was not at all like Zefirelli's flower child, but in real life an absolutely loyal supporter of the Papacy and Catholic orthodoxy and something of a fanatic when it came to respect for priests and the Sacrament. In his Rule, any brother who committed fornication was to be expelled from the order. No appeal, no second chance, no mercy. Out. The contemporary rule of the supposedly rigorous and hyper-orthodox Dominicans, by contrast, treated sins of the flesh as something that could be repented of, with penance assigned.