SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Pope Francis is showing more and more signs of being a real game changer, aggressive, fast-moving. He’s giving women a bigger voice in an aging papal hierarchy where old men have ruled for centuries. No more. Remember, even before Francis’s manifesto was posted last Thanksgiving, a New York Times headline read, “Conservative U.S. Catholics feel left out of pope’s embrace.”

“ ‘Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them.’ ” — Pope Francis

There’s a new leader running the Catholic Church, a radical reformer moving fast, hinting at the liberalization of outdated rules on women’s rights. And, yes, this is bound to have a huge, though indirect, impact on women’s rights in America and women in all areas.

Yes, the Pope is giving women new power. And he’s doing it at a time when conservative American politicians are not only actively trying to put women back in their place with health care and reproductive rights, but also disenfranchising everyone who doesn’t fit the elite image of their threatened old-men rulership. So you know they must wish they could impeach this radical progressive leader. Are furious. Trapped. Can’t do anything — popes have dictatorial powers from on high.

The new pope is changing the rules of the game, not just for his 1.2 billion faithful in the Catholic Church but across politics worldwide. And it will have a ripple effect on American and global economics. Because he is a radical reformer, clearly hell-bent on charging ahead. New rules. New resentments for conservatives.

Pope Francis is a conservative’s worst nightmare

Pope Francis is on record as an anti-capitalist. He’s anti-inequality, wants more government policies favoring the poor, at a time when GOP budget czar Paul Ryan just keeps attacking the poor. The pontiff is against capitalism’s failed trickle-down theories. Against today’s global obsession with materialism, with growth economics and our excessive consumerism. He criticized capitalism’s “new and ruthless idolatry of money.” He also took the media to task as misguided in playing up a “two-point stock-market loss” while ignoring such news events as when “an elderly homeless person dies of exposure.”

Technology didn’t even escape the pope’s attack in his “Apostolic Exhortation.” Silicon Valley must have felt the sting when Francis blasted it for giving priority “to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional,” where “what is real gives way to appearances” and technology drives the “deterioration of cultural roots” in nations that are “economically advanced but ethically debilitated.”

Small wonder that conservatives like Paul Ryan, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Christy and Rush Limbaugh hate what he stands for ... because Pope Francis is driving a stake directly into the heart of the GOP’s capitalist theology. Remember, Francis delivered the ultimate pro-socialist attack on today’s Ayn Rand–Paul Ryan brand of conservatism: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them.”

That puts Francis and his “officer corps” of 200 cardinals, 5,000 bishops, 450,000 priests and 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide — 78 million of them Americans — on a direct collision course with the GOP’s ultraconservative anti-poor budgets.

7 reasons old-men rulers feel threatened by women

A woman president? To clean up the mess conservatives are making? Yes, that’s the narrative. Seen as an attack on old-men rulers in our do-nothing, no-compromise, block-everything Congress dominated by a small group of myopic, austerity-obsessed Luddites, trapped in their 19th-century ideologies with teenager brains, controlling Washington, killing our economic growth, killing our superpower role, killing America’s future. So, yes, maybe it is time to replace them ... with adult women.

Gender research in behavioral economics, neuroscience and brain psychology confirms that women do think, feel and see the world different, and that affects how they value the economy. It’s a huge difference — women think long term. Men focus on the short term, myopic, aggressively gunning for big profits — before year-end, before quarterly earnings, before today’s closing bell.

Gender differences are summarized in many popular books, like 1992’s “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” But the differences still baffle so many men, especially old male politicians. Deep down they’re little boys, feel threatened, feel their power slipping away.

So they fight back, not fully understanding why, in fear, holding on to the past, because their brains tell them old guys should rule. Get it? It is a guy thing. Paternalism. Patriarchy. Basic psychology. Old guys feel so threatened if they can’t get their guy — Jeb or Chris or Marco or Rand — elected, a woman could be in the White House till 2024. Yes, Dems in power for 16 long years. Ouch. That’d be a death blow to the egos of the old-guy rulers.

If women’s and men’s brains really are so different ... if women really do see something that men are missing ... if America’s male-dominated patriarchy can’t grasp the wave of changes coming in government ... then, given the mess our economy is in, America really could use lots more female energy, women strategists in Washington. Fast. New leaders, a woman like Hillary Clinton in the White House, more power players like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill and the other elected women confronting the crusty old-men generals dominating the Pentagon.

History is moving fast, folks. Let’s review what’s now the single biggest global trend defining the 21st century: Why Bill Clinton says “Women Rule.” Seven trends we see driving this rapidly emerging new world of women:

1. New Economy’s job-skill needs empower women, level the playing field

Men raised in macho cultures with traditional values feel even more threatened as women gain equality and power. As New York Times reviewer Jennifer Homans writes of Hanna Rosin’s best selling “The End of Men, and Rise of Women”: “The end of men is really the end of a manufacturing-based economy. Six million lost jobs since 2000, mostly men.” As a result, “a new matriarchy is emerging: For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men ... run by young, ambitious, capable women ... taking matters into their own hands.”

2. More women in power positions across corporate America

Fortune magazine’s 15th annual list of “The 50 Most Powerful Women” tells us that when the list was launched in 1998 there were only two women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Today: 19 women CEOs, at giants like IBM, Pepsico, Xerox, Kraft and DuPont. Plus “more women wield more power than at any point in history,” including many “guiding the future of the global economy,” like IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. While the GOP is looking to the past, Pope Francis has his eye on the future

3. More women elected to legislatures all across America

Males believe they still hold the reins of government power. That delusion’s weakening, threatening male politicians as well as male carpenters. “The greatest rising force in American politics today is not a political party, nor is it the lobbying community,” The National Foundation for Women Legislators says. Instead, “it is women.” In the early 1980s “women held a mere 10% of all state legislative seats in the country; today they hold 24% of 7,382 seats nationwide. Currently 17 women serve in the U.S. Senate and 73 serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Plus six women are state governors. By 2050, women will be the power majority.

4. ‘Women Rule,’ says Bill Clinton: More women legislators across the world

This trend is sweeping the world. In “The Case for Optimism,” President Bill Clinton’s Time magazine feature last fall, he writes that the “world is getting better all the time,” in ways including technology, health care and green energy. His fourth megatrend: “Women Rule.” Worldwide, women now make up 20% of elected legislators, almost double the proportion of 15 years ago: “This is good news, not only for the individuals themselves but also for entire societies.” Why? “It’s been proven that women tend to reinvest economic gains back into their families and communities more than men do.” Yes, women not only think different from men; they think better.

5. Women’s brains are naturally wired with a long-term strategic vision

Money manager Jeremy Grantham says our male-dominated patriarchal culture has created “an army of left-brained immediate doers.” Wall Street and Corporate America think short term, discounting to zero longer-term social costs, like resource depletion, climate change.

Grantham predicted a global crash two years before 2008. Few listened. Now he warns the planet cannot feed the 10 billion population predicted for 2050. Again, few listen. Earlier he warned that our male-dominated capitalism has an “absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output.” No, the short-term-thinking male brain is not wired to solve the world’s biggest problems. Women’s brains are. America needs more women leaders.

6. Women are the new leaders, optimists in a ‘Fight for the Future’

“ ’[T]he future has never had a big enough constituency.’ ” — Bill Clinton

While too many men still resist, others are teaming up with women, equals working together. Here’s Bill Clinton’s fifth reason for optimism: “Justice, the Fight for the Future.” He knows “the future has never had a big enough constituency.” But things are changing, rapidly, because the survival of the planet requires new thinking, new strategies. Women get it. They are taking the lead. Clinton says we must “create a whole different mind-set. We are in a pitched battle between the present array of resources and attitudes and the future struggling to be born.”

7. Men are sabotaging their future, defending the old-guy patriarchy

Pope signals bigger roles for women

This cultural war exposes how men are their own worst enemy, sabotaging their future. Look beyond the “war on women” rhetoric in the political arena, where men fight to control women and women’s issues. The truth is, men fear there’s a “war on men”!

They’re out of touch with the future because they’re out of touch with themselves. Why? Look deep into the brains of these old-guy-ruler politicians. They’re just frightened little boys who feel threatened at a deep subconscious level they don’t understand. So they react, double down, fight harder to go back to a familiar power structure where old guys rule. But we can’t go back. Why? Because a cultural tidal wave is sweeping up both men and women in its path.

Listen: “Men are losing their grip,” writes Homans. “Patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching ‘the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era’ in which women, and womanly skills and traits, are on the rise.” But no one can reverse this historic shift, for the New Economy just keeps empowering more women, preparing them for the future.

While men stay trapped in the past, afraid, like little boys, that their archenemy Hillary may have just gotten a strong implied endorsement from the most powerful and radical leader in the world.