AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
December 22, 2013
Paul McGeough
Chief foreign correspondent
And so another rock star is born. Welcome Francis – that’s Pope Francis.
Just as the Norwegian Nobel Committee rushed to sanctify Barack Obama by awarding him the 2009 peace prize, even before he’d done unpacking at the White House, there’s a rush by the world’s news media to canonise Pope Francis, even before he’s warmed the papal throne at the Vatican.
As a new world figure Francis is a sensation, to be sure. One of the more endearing welcomes came from MSNBC’s cool and bespectacled young commentator Chris Hayes: ”Given the constraints of what being Pope is, you can operate in one of two ways: you can be a jerk about it, or you can be awesome – and this guy is choosing to be awesome.”
The Huffington Post is in raptures: ”We love him.” At Gawker, Francis is ”our cool new Pope” and Time magazine has named him its 2013 Person of the Year. Out with Benedict, the theology professor; in with Francis, the former janitor, nightclub bouncer, chemical technician and literature teacher.
These days we just can’t help ourselves. The insatiable appetite of a 24/7 news machine means we must constantly feed the beast, so we race ahead of the news and, in this case, serve notice that the hapless Francis must live up to our expectations as reformer extraordinaire.
As an institution, the church is in a bad way. Think child sex abuse on an industrial scale and money laundering, graft and homosexual blackmail at the Vatican. And will we ever forget the Bishop of Bling and the bathtub that cost $20,000 in the $42 million renovation of his palace at Lindberg, Germany?
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