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Pope Francis Is Time's Person Of The Year
By
Jen Chung
Published Dec 11, 2013
Modified Dec 11, 2013
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By
Jen Chung
Published Dec 11, 2013
Modified Dec 11, 2013
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Last year, Barack Obama was named Time's Person of the Year. Now Time has gone all popey-changey on us by picking the new guy in the Vatican, Pope Francis, as its 2013 Person of the Year. Because who can argue with a pope who calls Wall Street and the "idolatry of money" evil and sneaks out at night to tend to the homeless?
After pointing out some of the Catholic Church's problems ("scandal, corruption," "obsolete" views on contraception on divorce), Time writes:
This is a man with a sense of timing. He lives not in the papal palace surrounded by courtiers but in a spare hostel surrounded by priests. He prays all the time, even while waiting for the dentist. He has retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed-up Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his neck.
When he rejects the pomp and the privilege, releases information on Vatican finances for the first time, reprimands a profligate German Archbishop, cold-calls strangers in distress, offers to baptize the baby of a divorced woman whose married lover wanted her to abort it, he is doing more than modeling mercy and transparency. He is embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals. Asked why he seems uninterested in waging a culture war, he refers to the battlefield. The church is a field hospital, he says. Our first duty is to tend to the wounded. You don’t ask a bleeding man about his cholesterol level...
...Francis both affirms traditional teachings on sexuality and warns that the church has become distracted by them. He attacks priests who won’t baptize children born out of wedlock for their “rigorous and hypocritical neo-clericalism.” He declares that God “has redeemed all of us … not just Catholics. Everyone, even atheists.” He posed with environmental activists holding an antifracking T-shirt and called on politicians and business leaders to be “protectors of creation.”
None of which makes him a liberal—he also says the all-male priesthood is not subject to debate, nor is abortion, nor is the definition of marriage. But his focus on the poor and the fact that the world’s poorest 50% control barely 1% of its wealth unsettles those who defend capitalism as the most successful antipoverty program in history. You could argue that he is Teddy Roosevelt protecting capitalism from its own excesses or he is simply saying what Popes before him have said, that Jesus calls us to care for the least among us—only he’s saying it in a way that people seem to be hearing differently.
The cover was painted on a LCD display by Jason Seiler.
Runners up for Person of the Year include government contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden and gay rights activist Edith Windsor.
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Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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