What in God's name is up with the pope?

LAST WEEK, Pope Francis marked a triumphant return to South America by exhorting 30,000 young Catholics from his native Argentina to launch "a revolution" for God, to make "a mess" and "stir things up."

Yesterday, the 76-year-old pope took his own radical advice.

Pope Francis shocked a planeful of reporters - and much of the planet - with his compassionate remarks about homosexual priests, saying: "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?"

The olive branch cut a sharp contrast from the harsh tone of predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, who famously labeled homosexuality "an objective disorder," and seemed a high-water mark in Francis' crusade to present a kinder, gentler Roman Catholic Church for the 21st century.

In just four months as leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, Pope Francis has said that the Lord redeems even nonbelievers and called for "a deep theology of women in the church." He has washed and kissed the feet of Muslim female prisoners and railed against income inequality and a society "which seeks selfish profit, beyond the parameters of social justice."

What in the name of God is going on in Vatican City?

"He said he wanted to cause a disturbance," said Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest who grew up in Plymouth Meeting and is editor-at-large for the order's magazine, America. "He is stirring people up, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted."

Martin said it's all about one word - "mercy" - that's at the center of a none-too-subtle campaign to shift the Vatican away from the stern, punitive emphasis on cultural issues like abortion and homosexuality delivered by a cold, distant Benedict, who abruptly resigned in February.

The world may be responding - not just to Francis' empathetic message, but to his humble, earthy style, marked by carrying his own luggage, spurning an opulent summer retreat and urging priests to join him in walking the poorest backstreets.

His weeklong trip to Brazil for a World Youth Day was capped Sunday by an outdoor Mass drawing 3 million enthusiastic worshippers to the waterfront along Rio de Janeiro that is better known for beach soccer and thong bikinis.

But conservative church pundits wonder whether some are reading way too much into Francis' summer of love. None of his jarringly direct words on hot-button topics like homosexuality, atheism or the role of women have changed Catholic doctrine.

On National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote that despite all the hype, Francis' comment on gays "wasn't a break with Benedict or a policy change, but an elucidation of Church teaching (which popes don't make up on airplane rides)."

In interviews as recent as 2010, Francis - then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio - had agreed that the church is right to try to bar gays from entering the seminary and that "homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation."

Homosexual acts are still considered a sin (along with out-of-wedlock straight sex) - just as they were at this time yesterday. Despite calling for an increased role for women, Francis has said Pope John Paul II "closed the door" on female priests.

Rocco Palmo, the Philadelphia-based author of the Vatican-watching blog Whispers in the Loggia, agreed that nothing said by Francis changes church law, but that his revolution is to emphasize the compassionate teachings sometimes lost in the fervor of Benedict and his canonization-ready predecessor, John Paul II.

"It's not what you say, it's how you say it," Palmo noted.

Martin, the Jesuit priest, agreed, noting that simply Francis' use of the word "gay" is evidence of a sea change from a new pontiff reaching out to three huge groups who've been alienated from modern Catholicism: gays, women and the divorced.

Daniel Speed Thompson, a University of Dayton theologian, said Francis' words delivered to reporters on the flight from Brazil back to Rome may signal an eventual change in policy toward gay priests, but the broader meaning may be more significant. "There was a general implication about their [gays'] worth - and that's what has people talking."