

Pope’s Year-End Crackdown
In his decade heading the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has focused on bringing a gentle, welcoming spirit to the church. He has expressed love toward (if not full acceptance of) LGBTQ Catholics and emphasized the importance of tolerance over rigidity. Until this year. The 86-year-old pope has flashed signs of irritation before, calling a conservative Catholic TV network “the work of the devil” and talking about his American critics’ “backwardness.” The first big surprise came on Nov. 11, when the Vatican announced that Bishop Joseph Strickland had been fired from his job of leading the diocese of Tyler, Texas. Still, firing a bishop is extraordinarily rare. Typically, when a bishop runs into serious trouble—usually for mishandling sexual abuse, but sometimes for sexual or financial impropriety of his own—he is privately asked to resign.

