Pope Francis does not speak like an intellectual. He is not, like John Paul II, an original thinker, or, like Benedict XVI, a supreme scholar of the Tradition. He is a pope whose manner is simpler and more ordinary, and yet, when I hear him, I hear them.
Or, rather, I hear the same love song in glorious polyphony. His voice is individual and distinctive, but his concerns are their concerns; his themes are their themes. His words and gestures as Pope bespeak, like theirs, the essential personalism of the Church in the modern world.
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