Opinion
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VATICAN CITY, October 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Paris Match, a popular French weekly specializing in celebrities and “scoop” photos, published a lengthy interview with Pope Francis at the end of last week, with a host of flattering pictures shot in and around his apartments in the Casa Santa Marta, including one on the front cover. My local newsagent was selling the number busily when I went in to get my copy. Pope Francis is popular in France, and the Catholic media are giving ample coverage on the Synod on the Family.

Caroline Pigozzi, Match's interviewer, is well-known for her liberal leanings. Surely some of the questions people are asking about the pope, the synod, and the Church and its relation to the modern-day world were addressed when she met Francis at noon on the very day of the designation of the Nobel Peace Prize some were hoping he would get…

In fact, there was exactly nothing about the hot-button issues that have made headlines here in France for the last month. Not a word about divorced and “remarried” Catholics, the Church's attitude toward practicing homosexuals and homosexual civil unions, the opposition between traditional prelates and progressives that was already then so visible in the first days of the synod…

The synod itself was hardly mentioned, even though it was taking place just a few hundred yards from the site of the interview.

The interview focused mainly on “climate change,” the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (“Well, until America was discovered nobody imagined it existed, but it did!”), the Christians of the Middle East, refugees, the enthusiasm generated by the Pope's public appearances, and his “Jesuitical simplicity.”

Now, it is well-known here that Caroline Pigozzi specializes in “Daily life in the Vatican” and chatty, “small picture” portraits of reigning pontiffs. She cordially disliked Benedict XVI, regularly accusing “the dogmatic German Pope” of “faux pas” and “living between his pen and his piano.” He “looked down at feet” when they met, obviously “paralyzed by shyness,” “ill at ease” with women, she wrote when she first met him.

When writing about Pope Francis, Pigozzi doesn't even try to hide her enthusiasm. His dislike of protocol allows for a friendly nod when they meet – who wants to kiss the Fisher's Ring, anyway?

Perhaps the vacuity of the long report was mainly her doing.

But it surely was a public relations exercise. That is how it came over on the French. With the Paris Climate Conference only weeks away, the pope's encouragement in view of the summit appear to be the whole point of the interview.

How could this simple and pleasant man, who says he's “always been a priest of the streets” and who misses nothing more “than going out to have a good pizza with friends,” be worrying about anything else?