What do we think of Pope Francis? It all seems a bit complicated. One minute he’s telling the US Congress that “we, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners” and that they have to take climate change seriously. Speaking in Bolivia in July, he called unfettered capitalism “the dung of the devil.” Since he arrived in America, right-wingers have described him as “anticapitalist pope.”

On the other hand, the Catholic Church still continues to oppose marriage equality at every opportunity. Back in February, Francis compared any account of gender which “does not recognize the order of creation” — such as those which validate the lives of trans people — to the use of nuclear weapons. On Thursday, the pope canonized the missionary Junípero Serra, who oversaw a regime of horrific brutality against Native Americans in California, where colonization and conversion went, as so often, hand in hand.

It was so much easier to have an opinion about Francis’s predecessor — Benedict XVI was simply, everyone could agree, a reactionary, and not even a very effective reactionary. Doing nothing much about such issues as priestly child sex abuse, he seemed much more concerned about reviving the more obscure bits of the papal costume — a fluffy little shawl called the mozetta, a Santa-Claus-style hat called the camauro, and hand-made red leather shoes.