Beware bright and shiny leaders à la Barack Obama circa 2007: charming, wide-smiling, seemingly "regular guys" who talk in ambiguous and veiled phrases like "the fundamental transformation of America" that the foolish blindly tie their hopes to.  Pope Francis is riding such a high tide of Obama-like popularity and "newness" since becoming the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013. See the parallels.  He is a pope of many "firsts": the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Southern Hemisphere and Latin America, the first non-European pope since the Syrian Gregory in 741.  Recall that Obama was also a candidate of superficial "firsts."  In Pope Francis's case, he has the reputation of being less formal and appears more down-to-earth than his predecessors: he utilizes the political "average person" optics of a modest Fiat 500L rather than a limousine and...(Read Full Post)