I do not understand people who struggle to understand this pope

I don’t really believe they find him “confusing”. I think they just don’t want to listen to him. Everything you need to know about him is summed up in the words, “He has preached good news to the poor.” His mortal enemies are people who either a) dislike the Church’s teaching on our duty to the poor or b) dislike evangelism because it brings people they regard as riffraff into a Church they want to make an accessory to their views on money and power and race and aesthetics and not face it for what it is: the body of the living Christ.

So it has, for instance, become de rigeur for the shriekers and hysterics (who seriously thought that “He used a ferula once!  Eeeeeek!” was sufficient ground to nail him as a “heretic” to claim that saying some Catholic commonplace like “The poor save us” is somehow more firewood for the auto de fe in which he is to be burnt as a socialist.  At this point, everything and anything he says is simply proof for those whose minds are made up.  As previous accusers once said of another preacher of the gospel, “If this man were not an evildoer, we would not have handed him over.” (Jn 18:30). They aren’t interested in being just because they have goals, not principles.

Meanwhile, people still interested in the Tradition recall that “the poor save us” is simply a restatement of St. John Chrysostom’s remark that the rich exist for the sake of the poor, while the poor exist for the salvation of the rich.

The tradition sees money the way it sees every other spiritual gift: as a thing given to people for the sake of somebody else.  Cling to it and it poisons you.  See it as the means God gives us to bless somebody else and focus on that Somebody Else and not the money and it will not harm you.

Such thinking is utterly alien to most Americans and, above all, the Christianist who hates this pope and adores Donald Trump as the Ideal Man and the Anointed of God.