The windows Pope Francis has opened

Tis the season of Jesus, Santa and Pope Francis. It’s too early to place Francis in the pantheon of church reformers alongside Gregory VII or Adrian VI—or even next to John XXIII, who memorably announced the Second Vatican Council by saying that it was time to “open the windows and let some fresh air in.” But the early returns on the first Latin American pontiff suggest that his will be anything but a caretaker papacy.

First, Jorge Mario Bergoglio selected the name Francis, to honor Francis of Assisi’s concern for the poor. Then he spurned the papal car and accompanied the cardinals—who had just selected him to lead the church—back to their hotel so he could retrieve his luggage and settle his bill. He has chosen to live not in the Vatican’s papal residence but in a more modest apartment, where he regularly receives visitors. On Holy Thursday, Francis washed the feet of ten men and two women from a juvenile detention center. Two of the offenders were Muslim. 

To some degree, the pope has mixed substance with style. He has undertaken reform of the curia and the troubled Vatican Bank; he redirected the traditional annual bonuses for trustees of the bank to help the poor. He released his first “apostolic exhortation,” calling on the church to be “bold and creative” in addressing social ills, including the excesses of unbridled capitalism.