From the first day of his papacy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Papa Francesco, changed the mood music around the Vatican by presenting the world with a very different kind of pope. Wearing a simple white cassock, he declined to live in the papal apartment and chose instead to stay in a Vatican guesthouse so that he could continue to live in a community. He scandalized some Church traditionalists, washing the feet of female juvenile delinquents and expressing nonjudgmental compassion for gay priests, and treated everyone—even journalists—with infectious, sunny warmth, simplicity, and disarming candor. Without saying so, he seemed to be casting off a traditional idea of the pope as a solitary, infallible absolute monarch. Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 until 1958, ate alone all but a few times during his nearly twenty-year papacy. Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, had paid close attention to papal vestments, steeped in the liturgical meaning of this or that medieval garment.

The papacy during the last years of Benedict had come to seem an institution in sad decline, closed off behind the Vatican walls, out of touch, on the defensive, fighting a losing cultural war with its own followers, resigned to a smaller Church of “true believers,” in a hostile or indifferent secular world. Francis changed that almost overnight by showing how radically challenging it could be if a world leader tried to put into practice the basic precepts of the Christian gospel—dedicating oneself fully to task of loving and caring for others—and doing so with genuine joy.

Yet the question remained: Would these stylistic changes translate into significant, lasting shifts in the life and doctrine of the Catholic Church and, if so, how? We are beginning to get some concrete answers. Francis’s candid public interviews and his most recent publication, a two-hundred-and-twenty-four-page apostolic exhortation called “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), have attracted the most attention. But he has also made a series of careful management changes that may transform the Church.

The changes he outlines can be characterized by what he calls a paradoxical combination of “prudence and boldness.” Some of the boldness is present in the document’s language. It contains some ringing rhetoric as well as the directness of a priest talking to his parishioners. “The first novelty is the use of the first person,” Father Vicinio Albanesi wrote in the Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana. “There is no ‘royal we,’ and no convoluted, vague sentences.” This is accompanied by some wonderfully homespun, direct language. The clergy, Francis writes, must be so close to their flock that they “take on the ‘smell of the sheep,’ ” and only then are “the sheep … willing to hear their voice.” This means “standing by people at every step of the way, no matter how difficult or lengthy this may prove to be.”

Francis also included long passages decrying growing economic inequality, insisting that it is as much a Christian imperative to intervene in an “economy that kills,” as it is to respect the commandment against killing itself. “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” (John Cassidy has written more about that aspect of the document.)

But there is also considerable prudence in “The Joy of the Gospel;” on the surface, it does not appear to contain major doctrinal changes. Church traditionalists will be heartened by Francis’s clear statement that the stand against abortion will not change:

I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations.” It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.… Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right.

Similarly, Francis (as he as he has done before) made clear that there will be no ordination of female priests. But then, Francis adds a note of considerable interest: “It can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.… The ministerial priesthood is one means employed by Jesus for the service of his people, yet our great dignity derives from baptism, which is accessible to all.” This may seem like mere word play, sugarcoating a bitter pill, but what he is saying is actually quite radical. If you conceive of the Church as a pyramid of power, with the priesthood at the top, the Roman Curia above them, and the pope at its pinnacle, then the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a plain, intolerable injustice. But if you imagine a decentralized Church, in which local parishes and bishoprics have far more autonomy and there are many other ways of acquiring authority and serving, the priesthood recedes in importance. (But if all the bishops, and those with decision-making authority, are priests—and therefore men—it’s not clear that even a decentralized Church will necessarily guarantee a voice for women.)

Indeed, much of the document is concerned with reorienting the priorities of the Church rather than changing its doctrines. (These passages reaffirming aspects of traditional Church teaching occur toward the end, while the great bulk of the exhortation sounds notes of love, inclusion, and missionary passion.) While never criticizing his predecessors, Francis makes clear that he thinks the Church in recent decades has made a major mistake by placing divisive social issues at the center. “The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules,” he said in an interview this past August with Antonio Spadaro, the director of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica. “The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.… We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible.”

Francis explains that there is a “hierarchy of truths”: loving and caring for people comes way before, say, scolding believers with complex lives on the ways in which their behavior strays from traditional dogma. The confessional “must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best,” he writes.