But when people say, “He makes me want to believe again,” as a lapsed-Catholic journalist said to me during one of these awkward “What do you have against Pope Francis?” conversations, they aren’t usually paying close attention to the battles between cardinals and theologians over whether his agenda is farsighted or potentially heretical. Nor are they focused on his governance of the Vatican, where Francis is a reformer without major reforms, and the promised cleanup may never actually materialize.

What my friends and acquaintances respond to from this pope, rather, is the iconography of his papacy — the vivid images of humility and Christian love he has created, from the foot-washing of prisoners to the embrace of the disfigured to the children toddling up to him in public events. Like his namesake of Assisi, the present pope has a great gift for gestures that offer a public imitatio Christi, an imitation of Christ. And the response from so many otherwise jaded observers is a sign of how much appeal there might yet be in Catholic Christianity, if it found a way to slip the knots that the modern world has tied around its message.

To be a critic of such a pope, then, is to occupy something like the position of George Orwell, who opened an essay on Mohandas Gandhi with the aphorism, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” Except that the pope’s most serious critics are not skeptics like Orwell who don’t actually believe in saints: They are faithful Catholics, for whom criticism of a pontiff is somewhat like the criticism of a father by his son. Which means they — we — are always at risk of finding in the mirror the self-righteous elder brother in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, who resents his father’s liberality, the welcome given to the younger brother coming home at last.