[Peace-discuss] The New Yorker on the bishop of Rome

[C. G. Estabrook]

"PROFILES: WHO AM I TO JUDGE? A radical Pope’s first year." BY JAMES CARROLL
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_carroll?currentPage=all

The author, James Carroll (b. 1943) - not the author ('Basketball Diaries’), poet (‘People Who Died’) and punk musician (1949–2009) - is instead a standard-issue liberal (cf. his anodyne reference to the White House child-killer) whose voluminous writings have been concerned mainly with his autobiography - but this piece is much better than I expected it to be. 

Certainly some of his interpretations are arguable, but his reportorial energy (and that autobiography) has produced more insight than I expected from the writer I knew slightly 40 years ago. As a conventional liberal, he misses the fact that Catholic Christianity is now the largest anti-capitalist discourse in the world - and Francis has put himself at the forefront of that.

--CGE