Everyone wants to make the pope into their own image. The secular and dissenting left needs a “progressive” Francis who will finally bring the Church into the modern world. Radical Catholic reactionaries need a “liberal” Francis to alarm them into nostalgia. Mainstream traditionalists, devout and orthodox, find themselves quietly confused.
Dave Armstrong wrote this book for the third group. Nine chapters, each on a specific early Francis “controversy” — foot-washing (the female and Muslim inmates), the Rorate Caeli website hysteria, atheist salvation and salvation by works, the Blessed Virgin Mary at the cross, homosexuality, the Franciscan Friars and the Tridentine Mass controversy, pro-life, Evangelii Gaudium and alleged Marxism, and the La Civiltà Cattolica interview. The method is constant: what was actually said; how the media and the religious left spun it; how the religious right received or reacted; then the harmony with Catholic tradition, with biblical support where relevant.
The pope is in complete continuity with his predecessors. The substance has not changed. What has changed — strikingly, even radically — is style and emphasis. This book is the calm walkthrough.
Inside this book
- Foot-washing — female and Muslim inmates, canon law, and what Jesus actually demonstrated
- Atheist salvation, salvation by works, and the limits of the soundbite
- The Blessed Virgin Mary at the cross — an extended defense
- Homosexuality and pro-life teaching: the actual record vs. the headlines
- *Evangelii Gaudium*, the alleged Marxism, and the *La Civiltà Cattolica* interview
> “Armstrong saves his reader a fair bit of research effort, and presents material to him in a way that is logical, well-organized, and, most important of all, Catholic and orthodox.” — L. Robbins, Amazon review
