NEW YORK (NY)
VICE News
January 3, 2019
By Alex Norcia
As Francis issued some of his harshest words yet on the sex abuse crisis, a Cuban circus performer helped make him a meme.
Before his first weekly audience of 2019 on Wednesday, the man atop a once-mighty church, the one that has faced an unprecedented reckoning over systemic sexual abuse this past year, appeared to accomplish something remarkable: He spun a soccer ball on his finger for three seconds. Pope Francis seemed genuinely thrilled as it orbited on his limb, and, if you were just judging by the look on his face, you would have thought he was witnessing real magic—that he had just discovered something truly new on this planet. It was his burning bush. His smile was nearly childish, and totally sincere: Holy shit, you could imagine his interior voice saying, underneath his ecclesiastical hat, check me out!
It was a wonder to behold, especially for the internet. Not long after the clip had been uploaded, the successor of the apostle Peter was memed. That’s as much as he might hope for, I suspect, after a year of catastrophic revelations about abusive priests and cardinals, about broken reform efforts and payoffs, about lost faith and institutional decay. There he was, Pope Francis still, but instead of a rotating soccer ball balancing on his index finger, you had Earth, an uncooked pizza, a Harlem Globetrotters basketball.
You had lightening, sort of like the lightening Darth Sidious conjures to kill Jedi Master Samuel L. Jackson, leaving his hand.
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