Pope Francis's Phone-Call Theology

THIS weekend in Rome, the Catholic Church is celebrating a double canonization — two popes, two sainthoods, 2,000 buses full of pilgrims — that serves as a kind of capstone on Pope Francis’s first year in office, and an illustration of his agenda for the church.

The two popes are John XXIII and John Paul II, respectively the pontiff who summoned the Second Vatican Council and the pontiff who put his stamp on its interpretation. In the partially accurate clichés of Catholic punditry, they are the liberalizer and the conservative, the icon of Catholic progressives and the hero of the Catholic right. And in canonizing them together, Francis is engaging in very deliberate symbolism — signaling, not for the first time, a desire to push the church’s left and right toward a kind of synthesis, and to move Catholicism beyond its post-1960s civil war.