Pope Francis, Time magazine's Person of the Year, the most popular man in the world, is going to disappoint a lot of people, especially liberal Catholics, and others looking for the church to change in essence. Since he became Pope in March, Francis has morphed into a global phenomenon, remarkably similar to what happened to John Paul II.
Before becoming Pope, he had lived for decades as a Jesuit, then a bishop in Argentina. This experience certainly shaped this fascinating and intriguing man.
Francis's stylistic innovations have generated worldwide fascination. But he is perhaps best understood as a very old-style Jesuit: prayerful, self-sufficient, self-reliant, he takes his vow of poverty seriously.
Most famously, he does not inhabit the papal apartment but lives in two modest rooms at a Vatican hostel. He spends time with the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the homeless. This is powerful symbolism but it's not just symbolism. It is consistent with his pre-papal life.
Francis has become an unlikely hero to liberal Catholics and to the secular liberal media. This is mainly for two reasons.
One is that he is trying hard to change the style and image of the church. He does not want the whole, or the primary, message of Catholicism to be its rules about particular sexual practices - priestly celibacy, the refusal to remarry the divorced in church, abortion, contraception and the rest - which have so agitated the Western view of the church since at least the 1960s. Instead, Francis wants to centre the church's image on its preaching of Christ.
Second, the Pope strongly emphasises the church's concern for the poor and the ethical obligation on all people, certainly on all Catholics, to help the poor. That's challenging and rightly so.
But, and it is an enormous but, on all the grounds where modernism has had its most trenchant battles with the Catholic Church for at least the past 200 years, Francis reaffirms traditional doctrine.
Francis is undeniably a disconcerting figure for Catholic conservatives because of the pastoral innovations and intensity he espouses, and because of some of his comments about economics.
Recently, the Pope issued a 60- page exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel. It is a remarkable and gripping read, but as someone happy enough to wear the label conservative myself, I would say it reconfirms all the contentious Catholic doctrine it considers, is extremely challenging in the demands it makes of the faithful, and has a couple of odd paragraphs about economics that I think show a faulty understanding of the way wealth is created.
Conscientious Catholics believe the Pope has special authority on matters of faith and morals, but is no more authoritative on complex social and economic policy matters than anyone else. As one American wit put it: I believe the Pope is infallible, but he also gets a lot of things wrong!
The Pope is important not only to Catholics but to the entire world, given he heads a church of 1.2 billion people and is at the apex of the most important non-government organisation in the world.
As I say, on all the grounds where modernism has confronted Catholicism, Francis has reaffirmed traditional Catholic teaching. But a funny thing is happening to Francis. Because the media lauds him as a liberal, nothing conservative he says gets considered. This is an exact mirror reverse of what happened to John Paul II.
A lot of attention has been given to various interviews, reported encounters and even stray remarks of the Pope. Famously, when asked about a gay priest, he replied: "Who am I to judge?", and this has become a media leitmotif. In truth Francis seems a little naive, perhaps indiscreet, in his dealings with the media, and this is part of his refreshing differentness. But it can lead to confusion.
So his considered papal writings surely give us the best guide to his actual thinking.
The Pope's strong view that he doesn't want the church's teaching on contentious sexual matters to be its defining image has mistakenly led many liberals, Catholic and secular, to think he might change those rules.
What does Francis actually say about abortion? In The Joy of the Gospel he writes: "Among the vulnerable for whom the church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenceless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this ... I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or modernisations. It is not progressive to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life."
Or what about the church's position that there will never be women priests? Francis has a lot to say about enhancing the role of women in the church. And that makes perfect sense. Given the woes and misery of the church in recent decades, it's hard to imagine the church losing anything by much greater involvement of women. But let's get to the point. Will there ever be women priests?
Says Francis: "The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion."
Beyond women priests, though, the whole ideology that there is no intrinsic difference between men and women except that women can bear children, and that every other difference is socially constructed, is one of the most bitter confrontations between modernism and the church - I would say between modernism and human nature itself.
The Pope says: "The church acknowledges the indispensable contribution which women make to society through the sensitivity, intuition and other distinctive skills which they, more than men, tend to possess. I think, for example, of the special concern which women show to others, which finds a particular, even if not exclusive, expression in motherhood." Women and men, though absolutely equal in dignity, are not, after all, the same, at least according to the Pope.
The Joy of the Gospel reaffirms the central place of Mary in the Catholic Church and the Pope's view of the church's mission.
Satan, and the devil generally, are frequently mentioned. The Pope believes in the devil.
Indeed, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis described a proposal to legalise gay marriage as, literally, the work of the devil. The Pope profoundly wants to recognise and emphasise the human dignity of all people, including, obviously, gay people, but there is no prospect of a change in the actual teaching about sexual practice. For the church this finds fulfillment only in marriage, and marriage is only between a man and a woman.
I am not too disturbed about the sentence or two on economic policy that I disagree with, not least because Francis also writes: "Neither the Pope nor the church has a monopoly on the interpretation of social realities or the proposal of solutions to contemporary problems." The Pope recognises his fallibility in economic policy. The problematic economic sentences attribute, wrongly in my view, economic problems to the unfettered workings of the market or to what the Pope sometimes confusingly calls "neo-liberalism", which he doesn't define.
But these are footnotes to his genuine ethical message, which is that people need to help the poor and that societies should not exclude the marginalised.
How you do this, though, is deeply complex. The politician who believes you help people get work by deregulating the labour market is no less conscientious, or Christian, than the politician who believes you should increase regulation of the labour market to give more help to those who already have jobs.
Overall, we are left with the astonishing paradox that this fascinating Pope is preaching orthodox Catholic doctrine and receiving the plaudits of the world's media.
It's enough to make you believe in the Holy Spirit.