Well Worth Reading: CNN’s Belief Blog on Finding the “Francis Effect”

There’s an excellent new piece by Daniel Burke up at CNN’s Belief blog, “How to really measure the ‘Francis effect’.” (Full disclosure: I was interviewed along with some other Jesuits for the piece, and am briefly quoted in it — but don’t let that count against it. It really is a great piece.)

Despite the immense popularity the aged Argentine has won since his election last year, not a jot of doctrine has changed, nor has the Catholic Church swelled with American converts.
But there’s more than one way to measure a pontiff’s influence on his far-flung flock.
Start asking around — here in Boston and beyond, Catholics and atheists alike — and it’s easy to find people eager to share how one man, in just one year, has changed their lives.

Burke’s is one of the relatively few pieces I’ve seen that takes the challenge of describing the “Francis effect” seriously, and on its own terms. It doesn’t just bail out to tired and misleading contrasts with Benedict, and it doesn’t focus on speculation about doctrinal changes. Since it avoids both, it has a chance to describe what people are actually experiencing and responding to in Pope Francis’s ministry.

Burke interviewed a number of people in Boston, with a variety of connections to the Church. He doesn’t find (because it almost certainly doesn’t exist) a single unified description of the “Francis effect” — but he does show that something real and important is going on, something worthy of both secular and religious attention.