UNITED STATES
NPR
[with audio]
“Who am I to judge?” With those five words, Pope Francis “stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of popes and bishops,” writes columnist James Carroll. Francis made that statement in July, in response to a reporter’s question about the status of gay priests in the Church. In a new article about Francis in The New Yorker, Carroll describes the pope as having “unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world.”
Carroll was a seminarian and a priest during another great period of change — Vatican II, which, under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, led to reforms that modernized the church. As a priest from 1969 to 1974, he served as Boston University’s Catholic chaplain. He left the priesthood in part over his disagreements with the leadership after the death of Pope John and the beginning of what Carroll describes as a counterrevolution. He’s now an author and a columnist for The Boston Globe. His New Yorker article is called “Who Am I to Judge? A Radical Pope’s First Year.”
“It’s not new for popes to be critical of the free market economy, and it’s not new for popes to be concerned about the plight of the poor,” Carroll tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “But with Pope Francis there’s a centrality, a passion and an urgent insistence that’s unique that we haven’t seen before.”
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