Candida Moss is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame. 
 
 Late last year, when President Obama reviewed the draft of a speech he was scheduled to give on economic inequality, he sent it back with a request: He wanted his speechwriter to add a quote from Pope Francis’s recent letter to the Catholic church. 
 
 “Across the developed world, inequality has increased,” Obama said in the Dec. 4 speech. “Some of you may have seen just last week, the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How could it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?’” 
 
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 The rhetoric of quotation is subtle, but in this particular round of political name-checking, Francis is the authority brought in to lend credibility to Obama’s policies. 
 
 Compare this to Obama’s relationship with Pope Benedict XVI. At the conclusion of his visit to the Vatican in 2009, Obama reportedly said that he looked forward to “a very strong relationship between our two countries.” Our countries. While it’s true that the pope is the head of the Vatican state, that’s hardly his primary role. In Benedict’s case, Obama acknowledged only political parity, not moral authority. 
 
 With Francis, though, things are clearly different. By quoting him in that December address, Obama deferred to Francis as a moral exemplar—and a model for action of a decidedly temporal nature. This only 50 years after John F. Kennedy, soon to be America’s first and only Catholic president, declared that he wouldn’t take orders from the pope. 
 
 Herein lies the genius of Pope Francis’s papacy: He has persuaded the world he isn’t a politician and, in doing so, has become arguably the most politically influential man in the world. 
 
 Earlier this week, when Secretary of State John Kerry, a Catholic, visited the Vatican, he remarked, “I know that the Holy Father is anticipating the visit of President Obama here, and the president is looking forward to coming here to meet with him.” The two leaders have much in common. Their elections were both historic firsts—Obama as the first black U.S. president, Francis as the first pope from Latin America and the first Jesuit to occupy the throne of St. Peter. Both preside over deeply divided constituencies and institutions that have been plagued by scandal and bureaucratic incompetence. Both were initially media darlings who charted an unlikely path to power, and whose ascension was heralded as ushering in a hopeful new era. 
 
 And yet Pope Francis’s approval rating is more than double that of Obama’s. 
 
 Whenever they do meet—no date has yet been announced—President Obama would be wise to talk politics with Francis. He might be able to pick up a few pointers. 
 
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 Just as Obama began his presidency amid the global financial meltdown, when Francis was elected pope last March, he took the reins during a time of crisis. His predecessor, Benedict, had stepped down after only eight years, becoming the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415. 
 
 Francis "has persuaded the world he isn’t a politician and, in doing so, has become arguably the most politically influential man in the world," writes Moss. | AP Photo 
 
 The challenges facing Francis were manifold: dwindling church attendance in Europe and North America; in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, pressing issues like hunger and persecution; and across the globe, a laity reeling from the pedophilia scandals and deeply divided over the relative importance of moral issues like gay marriage and abortion versus social issues like poverty and the vast gulf separating the rich world from the rest. 
 
 Francis began his papacy by shrugging off the trappings of wealth and privilege. He refuses to live in the luxurious papal apartments, declines to wear the more ornate papal vestments and drives a Ford Focus where Benedict favored a custom-made Renault, a Mercedes and a BMW X5. He instantly became the “People’s Pope,” or, as Obama would put it, “someone who walks the walk.” 
 
 Perhaps even more disruptively, Francis declared himself a sinner—an acknowledgement in keeping with Catholic theology but rarely put so honestly by the church’s leaders—and refused to acknowledge that he even had power over the millions in his flock, much less tried to wield it. His utter lack of conceit has won him a legion of fans. ||||| Religion makes a lot of mistakes. 
 
 Faith traditions can be so harsh that they drive away everyone but the self-righteous scolds. Or they can so indulge in therapeutic comfort and manufactured joy that they come to seem like a charlatan’s game. 
 
 E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” View Archive 
 
 They can be so otherworldly that they offer no guidance to those living in this one on matters of justice, freedom and how we should live together. Or they are so captive to the here-and-now that it becomes hard to distinguish between a congregation and a party headquarters. 
 
 And for many in the wealthy nations and among the young, religion has no relevance to their lives whatsoever. It’s seen by some as a charming throwback and by others as one more insidious force focused on power, money and self-preservation. 
 
 When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope a year ago, only a few expected that the new Catholic leader would confront all of these challenges simultaneously. 
 
 1 of 27 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Pope Francis: Acts of humility View Photos The new prelate, who has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, is rewriting the rules in his first year at the Vatican. Here are a few of Francis’s symbolic moves and statements. Caption The pope’s actions are changing the rules at the Vatican. He tends to the sick Pope Francis kisses and blesses Michael Keating, 10, of Elverson, Pa., after spotting him on the tarmac of the Philadelphia airport. Keating has cerebral palsy and is the son of the director of the high school band that performed at Francis's airport arrival. Read the article. Joseph Gidjunis/World Meeting of Families via AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 Yes, his choice of the name Francis was a promising sign that he would emulate a saint devoted to the poor and to simplicity. Yes, he was already on record with searing criticisms of the injustices of global capitalism. From the beginning, he stressed his more humble role as the “Bishop of Rome,” suggesting an anti-imperial papacy. 
 
 And then it continued. He disdained the trappings of piety and might, including the ornate regalia that appeal to so many prelates. The Roman joke was that as priests got with his program, one could find many lacy surplices on sale at steep discounts on eBay. On his first Holy Thursday, Francis washed the feet not of the usual group of priests but rather of a dozen young people being held at a juvenile detention center, including two women and two Muslims. 
 
 He has not altered church doctrine, but his shift in emphasis has been breathtaking. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he has said. “This is not possible.” He thus declared that the church’s main mission would no longer be as a lead combatant in the culture wars. It would stand primarily with and for the neediest. 
 
 The most important aspect of a Pew survey released this month was not its finding that 68 percent of U.S. Catholics thought Francis was changing the church for the better, or that 76 percent said he was doing a good or excellent job of addressing the needs and concerns of the poor. No, the truly revealing fact about this study is that it did not even occur to Pew’s pollsters to ask in their benchmark poll a year ago whether poverty should be a priority of the new pope. This is no knock on Pew; the fact that its researchers had to include a new question about poverty this year shows how much Francis has transformed the church. 
 
 The pope said recently that he was uncomfortable with being seen as a “superman,” and indeed, he is not. Francis expressed his unease in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera during which he made the most troubling misstep of the year. 
 
 Speaking of the pedophilia scandal that has shaken the faith of so many Catholics, particularly in the United States and in Ireland, Francis was uncharacteristically defensive and aggressive, insisting that the Catholic Church “is perhaps the only public institution that has moved with transparency and responsibility.” 
 
 “No one has done more,” he added, “and yet the church is the only one that has been attacked.” 
 
 Pope Francis had a noteworthy first year as head of the Catholic church. PostTV reviews a few of the pope's memorable photo ops that seem to parallel with common Bible passages. We used The New American Bible. (Jonathan Elker, Gillian Brockell and Kate M. Tobey/The Washington Post) 
 
 In fact, the church is not “the only one that has been attacked.” Even if it were, a pope who has emphasized the urgency of seeing the world from the perspective of the vulnerable and the wounded should have been the first to hear how his words might sound to the victims of abuse. A leader who has criticized a “psychology of princes” and the “spirit of careerism” should have known better. 
 
 But the keen disappointment felt over this is a mark of how high Francis has lifted expectations. He has shown that the spiritual life is also a life of social commitment. He demands a lot while preaching about a God of mercy, confounding scolds and religious therapists alike. By engaging joyfully with nonbelievers and those who believe differently, he speaks to those skeptical that Christianity has anything left to say. 
 
 He called for a church that is “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets” and has proved that such a church is hard to ignore. 
 
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– He's known for his humility, his down-to-earth nature, his personal phone calls to the flock, and even his selfies. But is Pope Francis actually a "political genius"? Yes, writes Candida Moss at Politico Magazine. "Herein lies the genius of Pope Francis’s papacy: He has persuaded the world he isn’t a politician and, in doing so, has become arguably the most politically influential man in the world." The thing is, predecessor Benedict said many of the things Francis is saying. But with Francis, because of how he leads his life, more people listen. President Obama would do well to pay attention to this pope, writes Moss. "What other world leader has such clarity of message?" Maybe Obama can't literally get as close to the public as Francis can, but he can take a larger lesson: Francis "shows that even in the informational deluge of the modern age, it’s possible to hold to and embody a few big ideas and persuade people to rally around them," writes Moss. "What American president couldn’t benefit from a reminder of that?" Click for the full piece.