I begin with Fr Ray Blake’s current post. “For me”, he says, “Pope Francis is still a ‘puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma’, is he a conservative or a liberal, incredibly subtle or just crass, is he going to lead the Church into deep waters or onto the rocks? A year on from his election and there are still no clear answers.” I’m not so sure. I don’t think he’s crass: he wouldn’t have maintained the extraordinary credibility he currently enjoys among those not of the faith (something to thank God for incidentally, and not to sneer at) if he had been. As for subtlety, well, certainly, it’s not the traditional European-style subtlety involving a certain kind of understated intellectual finesse; it’s rather a more spontaneous, new world subtlety which relies more on quick thinking and a sense of equilibrium, on keeping his balance when you might think he could lose it, like a skilled horseman on a frisky mount. As for the big question, “is he a conservative or a liberal”? –in matters of doctrine he’s very clearly (as all Popes are, it’s what they’re for) a conservative even when the press thinks otherwise; and when it’s a matter of his pastoral instincts, he’s a liberal in the sense of being what is I fear still called (dread phrase) “non-judgmental”: hence the notorious airborne “who am I to judge?”: he wasn’t saying that the Church’s teachings on homosexual acts were no longer operative, that there was some difference between his “policy” on the matter and that of previous popes: he was saying that God would judge individuals, and that it wasn’t for him to do so, a wholly orthodox proposition: judge not lest ye be judged. Pastorally, he is happiest and most effective saying what he’s for rather than what he‘s against. He has made it clear, for instance, that he affirms the Church’s teaching on single sex marriage: he’s against it. What he’d rather do, though, is say why he’s in favour of the real thing, as he did this week at the Wednesday general audience: