ime Magazine has selected Pope Francis as ‘Person of the Year’ for the year 2013.
TIME magazine praises Pope Francis as below.
How do you practice humility from the most exalted throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis. In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power.
This year Pope Francis had made lot of influence in social media. Many videos of Pope Francis went on viral. Pope Francis is the most influential person in Facebook, according to ‘year in review’ report of Facebook.
Few weeks back, a little boy interrupted Pope Francis while he was speaking during a rally in support of family life in St. Peter’s Square. The pope smiled at the boy as he continued his speech in front of a crowd of thousands.
Pope Francis was speaking in St. Peter’s Square about the important role grandparents play when a little boy walked up behind him and confidently climbed up and sat down on the pontiff’s white chair.
Acting like an indulgent grandpa, Francis let the boy explore the area undisturbed before tens of thousands of people. The pope smiled while reading his speech as the boy sat in the empty chair, gazed up at him and even at one point clung to the pontiff’s legs.
And, a touching image of Pope Francis tenderly embracing a severely disfigured man in St Peter’s Square, Vatican was also going on viral.
Pope Francis kissed and blessed the man, whose face was covered in boils, after his general address at the Vatican. The pope laid his hands on the head of the sick man, who is believed to be suffering from the rare disease Neurofibromatosis, and closed his eyes in prayer.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, U.S President Barack Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Sen. Ted Cruz, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, gay rights activist Edith Windsor and Miley Cyrus are the other finalists in the Time’s Person of the Year selection process.
TIME justifies the selection of Pope Francis by saying,
The heart is a strong muscle; he’s proposing a rigorous exercise plan. And in a very short time, a vast, global, ecumenical audience has shown a hunger to follow him. For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year.
Last year (2012), Time Magazine selected Barack Obama as ‘person of the year’.
Francis (Born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 17 December 1936) is the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, a position also holding the roles of Sovereign of Vatican City and the Bishop of Rome.
Born in Buenos Aires as the son of Italian parents, Bergoglio worked briefly as a chemical technician before entering seminary.
Throughout his life, both as an individual and a religious leader, Bergoglio has been noted for his humility, his concern for the poor, and his commitment to dialogue as a way to build bridges between people of all backgrounds, beliefs, and faiths.
