Nah, can't be... people LIKE him? LISTEN to him? Nah...

A conversation between John Allen and George Wiegel for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life :
http://www.pewforum.org/events/?EventID=173#defense
... let’s talk about what have been some of, at least from my point of view, the surprises of the past three years. First of all, there is this pope’s striking popularity, which I don’t believe has registered well on certainly North American radar screens. His weekly general audience on Wednesdays consistently draws crowds larger than or as large as John Paul II drew at the height of the Great Jubilee of 2000. Last December when I was in Rome for a work period, I walked through the parcheggio, the parking lot where the tourist buses are coming, to see if this was still overwhelmingly from Germany and Austria. And that’s not the case; in fact, it’s overwhelmingly Italian and from all over the country.
This pope has touched something in the people of Italy, perhaps a hunger to be fed by a master teacher. And that brings us to the second surprise, that this man so widely regarded as a kind of enforcer, a kind of heavy, turns out in this role to be the gentle and brilliant grandfather who knows how to explain things and make the most complex parts of Catholic doctrine and practice make sense to ordinary people, which means all of us in this room.