Francis is the first Pope who doesn’t beat around the bush

I don’t know about this Pope at all. I really don’t. He doesn’t fit in the pattern of popes I grew up with, writes Terry Prone

The Papacy, for me, started with Pius the 12th, a man of visible asceticism who seemed born for a tiara and whose hands seemed to have been shaped for formal front, side and other side blessings. His papacy was definitive.

My family had a peculiar relationship with the Church. My father served Mass every day in the convent of the French Sisters of Charity. He also spent pre-lunch on Sunday giving out about the bad theology manifest in the priest’s sermon that morning. My mother would sometimes condemn the sermon for Hallmark Card banality, muttering the giveaway phrases into the oven as she checked on the chicken. Now and then she’d take a different tack and have a go at the curate’s diction. Very hot on diction, my mother was. My sister would then go highminded on us, announcing that a little Christian charity wouldn’t go amiss, which, like all calls to virtue, pissed everybody off and so we would sit down to lunch in domestic disarray. To this day, the smell of roast chicken evokes for me the fascinating dissection of a sermon, and Sunday lunch is never quite complete for me without a bloody fine row.