Here is Will Saletan calling Pope Francis a liberal.  Here are some of Andrew Sullivan’s readers exploding with joy over the pope’s recent interview:

Wow! I wondered if Pope Francis could possibly be for real.  He seems the absolute embodiment of what I always thought the Catholic Church was supposed to be about – promoting the ideas and teachings of Jesus, not running a corrupt organization without a shred of mercy, divine or otherwise.  Pope Francis is having a tremendous pull on me.  I rejected the Church long ago, but I’m drawn to this man and what he has to say.  I hear a voice inside me that says “yes”.

I have always been of two minds about this sort of thing.  On the one hand, the new guy is saying a lot of good things–the kind of things I had my fictional pope saying in Pontiff. On the other hand, the Church has a long long history of being dogmatic and authoritarian and, after thirty plus years of John Paul and Benedict, it is run by people who like it that way.  What is likely to change, besides tone?  And is tone enough?

The leader of the archdiocese of Boston is named Sean O’Malley, and he seems like a terrific guy.  He even has a blog!  In the blog he has a heartwarming anecdote about a relief worker distributing food to starving Africans.

At the end of the line, the last person was a little nine year old girl. All that was left was one banana. They handed it to her. She peeled the banana and gave half each to her younger brother and sister. Then she licked the banana peel. The relief worker said at that moment he began to believe in God.

Let’s all be like that little girl!  But, you know, the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control may be part of the reason why there were too many people in that line, and not enough food.  Wouldn’t it be nice if, in addition to not being so obsessed with birth control and homosexuality and abortion, as Francis put it in his interview, the Church could start remedying the damage those obsessions have already done to the world. I’m not optimistic.