Is the liberal project doomed to fail? If we fail to exercise the Jesus Option, it undoubtedly will. And if we are faithful, and choose the Jesus Option, though we be “bruised, hurting, and dirty,” it will matter comparatively little if it does.

The brilliance of the Franciscan papacy is the ever so subtle shift from the total evisceration of the individual to her radical transformation in Christ. This affects the Church, too, whose culture is being recalibrated for a new age of evangelization.

Francis is calling the Church, and the world, to reject ideology as such, to decolonize and disabuse itself from the deleterious effects of Western intellectualism, to perform an embrace of reality, most of all, the reality of Christ.

The two popes, like MacIntyre, are concerned by a degradation in moral thought effected by relativism; but equally all three see a need for cultural critique, and one with no place for terms like conservatism or liberalism, traditionalism or progressivism.

If we can see past the “optionality” of Benedict and Francis, perhaps we can see the deeper truth that the change each of them represents is not the change from one to the other, but the change they both seek for each of us.