The New Vatican: Less Shitty

For the longest time, the Catholic Church has been a stuck-up, bureaucratic, "old-school" mess. The last Pope just could not help but look evil, and half the crap he did was ridiculous and stupid. But now Pope Francis is in charge, and he's changing stuff up. In the half a year he's been in charge, he's managed to begin the process of changing the Church's growing image problem.

Francis is humble beyond belief, driving himself around in a second-hand car, calling to cancel his newspaper delivery, and personally calling some people who have written him. He's said "who am I to judge" gay people, and now he's even opening up to atheists and agnostics, which, in the eyes of many, older catholics, is the equivalent to speaking with the Devil himself.

Archbishop Pietro Parolin

An Italian newspaper, run by an agnostic, recently published a series of editorials asking if "the Christian God forgives those who do not believe and do not seek faith."
Pope Francis wrote a detailed, and wonderfully anger-free response to the paper saying atheists should "abide by their own conscience" and that "God's mercy" extends to them, too. (You can get the full story on that letter in the video below if you wish.)

Meanwhile, Francis' soon-to-be secretary of state has been doing something else controversial, at least by Catholic standards, talking about priestly celibacy.
When he was asked about it by a Venezuelan newspaper, Archbishop Pietro Parolin said the matter was open to discussion. "Celibacy is not an institution, but look, it is also true that you can discuss (it) because as you say this is not a dogma, a dogma of the church," Parolin told NBC News.

He did, however, stress that it is a long-held Catholic tradition. "The efforts that the church made to keep ecclesiastical celibacy, to impose ecclesiastical celibacy, have to be taken into consideration. One cannot say simply that this belongs in the past." (To see his full, translated statement head on over to the National Catholic Reporter.)

Over the past decade, and even before that, the Church has been slowly gaining an image of crappiness, thanks to ignorance of science ("Let's spend billions of dollars to make sure Africans don't use condoms to cut down on population growth, because if there's one thing God wants, it's more starving children!", "Stem cell research is evil because it could save lives!"), ignorant policies ("Homosexuals aren't people."), so called "anti-women" lobbying (Apparently thinking abortions are morally wrong is "anti-woman." I don't really see that, but a lot of the churches stuff on rape and such is annoying, and definitely anti-women.), and just general ignorance and annoyingness.
But Francis is doing simply a fantastic job turning that image around. Sure, not much has actually been done to fix any of these problems, but Francis is a huge step in the right direction, and I feel like he may be able to patch up their image, change some things, and maybe prevent the eventual collapse of the Church as young people abandon it's stupidness.
There's a lot of work that needs to be done, but Francis is the man to do it, me thinks.