Francis, top center, among the bishops of the Church. Too worried about gays and the divorced to condemn the threat of mass murder by nuclear weapons

Michael Gallagher

I’m just mild about Francis: Pope Francis, that is. I’m afraid I can’t get that excited about either the Synod of Bishops, whose first session just ended, or the Pope himself. I don’t deny that gay marriage, admitting divorced Catholics to Communion, and the like are serious issues that warrant discussion and should be resolved. And I commend Francis’s statement about the “hostile inflexibility” of conservatives within the church. But in the meantime gay Catholics will continue to get married, and divorced and remarried Catholics will continue go to Communion, let men clad in soft garments in Rome expostulate as they will. (My aged Irish mother once told her Jesuit son over her martini: “You know, I never believed half…