Alexander Chancellor: What Pope Francis and Silvio Berlusconi have in common

It’s filthy wet weather in Tuscany, so I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon reading through the Italian newspapers. They are full of stuff about Pope Francis — how his humility, his simplicity, and his reforming zeal are breathing new life into the Roman Catholic Church. They say that the long decline in church attendance in Italy has been reversed in the few months since a previously little-known bishop from Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected to the papacy. His public appearances at the Vatican are also drawing enormous crowds. He is, in short, a superstar, and by no means in Italy alone. Everywhere in the world, including Britain, lapsed Catholics are flocking back to church. And even among non-Catholics on the left, his popularity is huge. In last Saturday’s Guardian, the self-confessed atheist Jonathan Freedland wrote passionately in his praise. The Pope’s personal modesty, he said, conveyed ‘a powerful message of almost elemental egalitarianism’; and he was now ‘the world’s loudest and clearest voice against the status quo’.