Andrew Sullivan

Read the whole thing, but here are two quotes:

[Francis] is great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all, he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier…

Francis wanted a mendicant order and an itinerant one. Missionaries who wanted to meet, listen, talk, help, to spread faith and love. Especially love. And he dreamed of a poor Church that would take care of others, receive material aid and use it to support others, with no concern for itself. 800 years have passed since then and times have changed, but the ideal idea of missionary, poor Church is still more than valid. This is still the Church that Jesus and his disciples preached about.

The above is from the pope himself. This is from a comment on the above from Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry:

The problem here, as always, is pride. We think like politicians. We parse words for whether they help the Republican Party of the Church or the Democratic Party of the Church, whereas we should be humbly receiving the teachings of the Vicar of Christ. When those teachings seem shocking to us, common sense alone dictates that, instead of rending our garments, we should, with humility and charity, check ourselves to see what we can learn.

On the one hand, we have the Republican Party of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism trying to shut down the United States Government – and on the other, we have the Pope sounding like one of the sanest and reasonable Church leaders I have ever heard.

This proves it. Quantum theory is true – and I’ve somehow landed in an alternate universe…