TP O'Mahony: The 2023 Synod in Rome will be a referendum on Francis' Papacy 

The Pope has won many admirers by moving the Church away from the concept of a monarchical papacy, and his attempts to reshape the Church as “the people of God” 

Pope Francis remains something of an enigma, even after a pontificate of nine years.

This was part of the blurb for my 1979 novel Sex and Sanctity: “One of the last bastions of male privilege is toppled when, in a small rural parish in Southern Ireland, a woman is ordained as a priest of the Catholic Church. The hierarchy is aghast, the country is agog.” 

The novel - which was based on pie-in-the-sky theology of course - so incensed the then papal nuncio Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi that he wrote a letter of protest to Major Vivian de Valera, the managing director of the Irish Press where I was then the religious affairs correspondent.