Pope Francis does not cease to surprise me with statements I would have never have expected to hear from a living Pope. When Karol Wojtyla was elected in 1978, during his inauguration Mass, he appealed to Catholics to: “Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilisation and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows ‘what is in man’. He alone knows it.”

His Argentine-born successor is just back from a trip to Krakow where Wojtyla served as archbishop for 14 years. In Krakow, Francis presided over the celebrations of World Youth Day, a mass gathering of Catholic youth convened for the first time by John Paul II in 1985.

Bergoglio shares the same capacity Wojtyla had to reach out to people and to communicate as well as his great sense of humanity. Moreover, John Paul II had this aura of sanctity which he carried with him. With Francis, it is possibly his humility that strikes me most – it is a humility that is not put on for show but an integral part of his very being as a man, a Christian and a bishop. In the words of Augustine of Hippo, “For you I am a bishop, with you, after all, I am a Christian”.

If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence – Pope Francis

Wojtyla drew crowds wherever he went and the same could be said of Francis. Yet Francis is so different from his Polish predecessor. There is something in him that endears one to him much like John XXIII, who was elected as a stopgap pope yet initiated the widest ranging aggiornamento ever in the Catholic Church.

I love to listen to Roncalli’s ‘Moonlight speech’ on the night of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 and his appeal for parents to go back home and give their children a hug from the Pope.

When Jorge Bergoglio appeared for the first time on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica as Bishop of Rome on March 13, 2013, he gave out the same grandfatherly feeling with his warm buonasera greeting. What had struck me most was when before imparting his blessing to the crowd, he bowed his head and asked the people gathered in the square for their prayers and blessing.

Francis has also been a man who leads firstly by example. Despite his position, he chose to continue living a simple life and to shed many of the pontificalia which his immediate predecessor in particular seemed to be so attached to.

However, it’s not just in style that Francis is a different kind of pope. His willingness to break with the past is also reflected in his attempts to reform the Roman Curia and its structures, including the murky Vatican finances. He rejects the model of a Church that is an institution serving its own purpose.

Moving beyond John Paul’s ‘open wide the doors’ appeal, Francis believes that: “Instead of being just a Church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a Church that finds new roads... to those who have quit or are indifferent.”

Clearly, the current Pope does not see his mission just in terms of ministering to the faithful. Where the latter are concerned, he is also very challenging.

In the words of Robert George of Princeton University, when addressing the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, on May 13, 2014: “The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past. It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid. There are costs of discipleship —heavy costs, costs that are burdensome and painful to bear.”

He is even more challenging towards his bishops and priests going so far as to tell the latter that good priests don’t own gloves, they get their hands dirty. In November 2013, Pope Francis has said that men studying for the priesthood should be properly trained or the Church could risk “creating little monsters” more concerned with their careers than serving people, adding that priests should leave their comfort zone and get out among people on the margins of society, otherwise they may turn into “abstract ideologists”.

Possibly some of the Pope’s most audacious statements have been uttered when addressing impromptu press conferences on the airplane when travelling on his visits outside Rome. Returning from Armenia last June, Francis spoke of the need for the Church to apologise to gay people, to the poor, to exploited women, to children exploited for labour as well as for having blessed many weapons.

Flying back to Rome from Krakow last Sunday, he condemned the tendency to link Islam with terrorism. Speaking a couple of days after the brutal murder of Father Jacques Hamel by Isil-linked terrorists in the French city of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, Francis said: “It’s not right to identify Islam with violence. It’s not right and it’s not true.”

Referring to the various violent acts in Italy he reads about daily in the newspapers, he said these acts were perpetrated by baptised Catholics and that, therefore, “If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence”.

On Tuesday, the Vatican announced that the Pope had set up a commission to study the role of women deacons in early Christianity. Deacons are ordained ministers and it is still very premature to speculate that the setting up of the commission may lead to the ordination of women as deacons, possibly as a first step towards the ordination of women as priests. However, it does indicate that Francis is seriously trying to re-evaluate the role of women in the Church.

In another press conference, this time on a flight to Rome following the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, he had stated that “the role of women in the Church is not simply that of maternity, being mothers” and added that “women, in the Church, are more important than bishops and priests” though expressing sorrow that the Church still lacks “a profound theology of womanhood”.

We often read or hear reports of the resistance that Pope Francis encounters particularly by the so-called conservatives within the Church. There are those within the Roman Curia and beyond who consider that he is reducing the importance of the institutional aspect of the Church while diluting its teaching on certain important issues particularly those relating to human behaviour. Moreover, whereas conservatives love traditional worship, Francis’s style is completely in the opposite direction.

What they fail to see, however, is that the Pope is managing to reach out to a substantial number of believers who had grown disenchanted with a Church that appeared to be detached from reality. Francis is like the good shepherd who will not hesitate for one moment to leave his flock of 99 sheep in order to find the one which is ‘lost’.

Pilgrims react as they take pictures of Pope Francis during World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland. Photo: Kacper Pempel/Reuters