Pope Francis' straightforward efforts of kindness and generosity

"In fact, Francis’s exercise of the papal role reflects the Jesuit practice of discernment, which involves waiting, listening, letting competing options for action emerge, and choosing one after prayer and internal deliberation.
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Francis has acted on his conviction that Catholic faith is less about the use of power to shape the social order — the stuff of present strongmen and past popes — than about straightforward efforts of kindness and generosity.
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Francis could serve as pope for another year, or five or 10. The test of his soft power in the coming years will be its encounter with hard power. Will he issue an encyclical on migration and the demonizing of the immigrant “other”? As he seeks openings for the church in seething Russia and rising China, will he address those countries’ human rights violations, opposing authoritarianism with the authority of the Gospel?
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Symbolically, the papacy is meant to be a “contrast structure” to worldly forms of authority. Too often, it has been such a structure in the wrong ways: crabbed, self-protecting, aloof and denunciatory. Five years into his pontificate, Francis is no small-d democrat, no faultless leader — and no perfect pope. And yet in this pope, our upside-down age has a leader whose approach and example stand as reminders of what the sensitive exercise of power can look like".

Paul Elie, the author of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Reinventing Bach,” is a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

From The New York Times