After Pope Francis died Monday morning, a few hours after blessing a crowd on Easter Sunday, the New York Times started rolling out tributes to the pontiff at nytimes.com, plus a standard 7,000-word obituary by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, the current and former Rome bureau chiefs for the Times., respectively.
Horowitz adored Francis as pontiff, and the obit predictably hailed the left-leaning pope as a force for “inclusion” against “doctrinaire” conservatives (as if “doctrinaire” is a dirty word when talking about religious doctrine!). However, the phrase “liberal” was scarce in the early coverage, while “conservative” opponents of Pope Francis were easy to find and framed as the enemy of openness.
Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with…
