Make Catholicism weird again

There’s a photo of the late Pope by Pablo Leguizamon doing the rounds. It shows then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on the Buenos Aires underground in 2008, surrounded by commuters. It’s easy to see why it is popular. A portrait in humility or rather democracy: a senior member of the Catholic Church on the subway like everybody else. He looks impeccably cool, with a wry look and the ghost of a smile on his face — more like a boxing coach or a mafia consigliere than a leading clergyman. It is usually accompanied with some quote saying he’d worked as a janitor, a nightclub bouncer and a chemical technician in a lab. He was someone, in other words, from our own temporal world.Part of the attraction of Pope Francis, even to professional literal communists online, comes from negative space. He was all the more impressive because of what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a corrupt power-hungry operator like the Borgia and Medici popes, nor was he a stern conservative patriarch like Pope Pius IX. But thi...