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Video: The 'tender' revolution of Pope Francis
France 24
December 30, 2014
http://www.france24.com/en/20141229-focus-vatican-catholic-church-pope-francis-tenderness-spiritual-alzheimer/
[with video]
Pope Francis began the year with an overhaul of the Vatican’s scandal-ridden bank and ended it with a scathing critique of the Vatican’s power-hungry bureaucracy.
Since his election as the church's first Jesuit head, the Argentinian pope has proved to be a popular force in the Catholic world and beyond.
He is the first pontiff to have received victims of sexual abuse by clergymen at the Vatican and has set up a commission to root out the "plague" of paedophilia inside the church.
The 78-year-old pope has also launched a number of sweeping financial and administrative reforms, and drawn up a list of the “15 ailments” he says are afflicting Catholicism’s highest-ranking officials.
His calls for “tenderness” and “love”, and salvos against the church bureaucracy’s “spiritual Alzheimer's”, have sanctioned his reputation as the people’s pope. But his soaring popularity and reformist zeal have unsettled some.
FRANCE 24's Josephine McKenna and Natalia Mendoza gauge the mood in St Peter’s Square and review the revolution underway at the Holy See.
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