person of the year essay

Pope Francis, The Choice

With a focus on compassion, the leader of the Catholic Church has become a new voice of conscience. Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs explains why Francis is TIME's choice for Person of the Year 2013

To read about TIME’s choice in Spanish and Portuguese, click below. EL ELEGIDO: El Papa Francisco es la Persona del Año 2013 de TIME A Escolha: O Papa Francisco é a Personalidade do Ano eleita pela Time em 2013

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

How do you practice humility from the most exalted throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis . In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage , the temptations of power.

At a time when the limits of leadership are being tested in so many places, along comes a man with no army or weapons, no kingdom beyond a tight fist of land in the middle of Rome but with the immense wealth and weight of history behind him, to throw down a challenge. The world is getting smaller; individual voices are getting louder; technology is turning virtue viral, so his pulpit is visible to the ends of the earth. When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church .

( PERSON OF THE YEAR : Pope Francis, The People’s Pope )

The skeptics will point to the obstacles Francis faces in accomplishing much of anything beyond making casual believers feel better about the softer tone coming out of Rome while feeling free to ignore the harder substance. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally. At its best it inspires and instructs, helps and heals and calls the faithful to heed their better angels. But it has been weakened worldwide by scandal, corruption, a shortage of priests and a challenge, especially across the fertile mission fields of the southern hemisphere, from evangelical and Pentecostal rivals. In some quarters, core teachings on divorce and contraception are widely ignored and orthodoxy derided as obsolete. Vatican bureaucrats and clergy stand accused of infighting, graft, blackmail and an obsession with “small-minded rules,” as Francis puts it, rather than the vast possibilities of grace. Don’t just preach; listen, he says. Don’t scold; heal.

And yet in less than a year, he has done something remarkable: he has not changed the words, but he’s changed the music. Tone and temperament matter in a church built on the substance of symbols—bread and wine, body and blood—so it is a mistake to dismiss any Pope’s symbolic choices­ as gestures empty of the force of law. He released his first exhortation, an attack on “the idolatry of money,” just as Americans were contemplating the day set aside for gratitude and whether to spend it at the mall. This is a man with a sense of timing. He lives not in the papal palace surrounded by courtiers but in a spare hostel surrounded by priests. He prays all the time, even while waiting for the dentist. He has retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed-up Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his neck. When he rejects the pomp and the privilege, releases information on Vatican finances for the first time, reprimands a profligate German Archbishop, cold-calls strangers in distress, offers to baptize the baby of a divorced woman whose married lover wanted her to abort it, he is doing more than modeling mercy and ­transparency. He is ­embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals. Asked why he seems uninterested in waging a culture war, he refers to the battlefield. The church is a field hospital, he says. Our first duty is to tend to the wounded. You don’t ask a bleeding man about his cholesterol level.

( MORE : Everything You Wanted to Know about TIME’s Person of the Year )

This focus on compassion, along with a general aura of merriment not always associated with princes of the church, has made Francis something of a rock star. More than 3 million people turned out to see him on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro last summer, the crowds in St. Peter’s Square are ecstatic, and the souvenirs are selling fast. Francesco is the most popular male baby name in Italy. Churches report a “Francis effect” of lapsed Catholics returning to Mass and confession, though anecdotes are no substitute for hard evidence, and surveys of U.S. Catholics, at least, see little change in practice thus far. But the fascination with Francis even outside his flock gives him an opportunity that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, never had—to magnify the message of the church and its power to do great good.

The giddy embrace of the secular press makes Francis suspect among traditionalists who fear he buys popularity at the price of a watered-down faith. He has deftly leveraged the media’s fascination to draw attention to everything from his prayers for peace in Syria to his pointed attack on trickle-down economics, which inspired Jesse Jackson to compare him to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rush Limbaugh to wonder whether he’s a Marxist. When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak. Why has he not said more about the priest sex-abuse scandal? ask victims’ advocates. (Just this month, he set up a commission to address the abuse of children by priests.) Why does he not talk more about the sanctity of life? ask conservatives, who note that in his exhortation, abortion is mentioned once, mercy 32 times. Francis both affirms traditional teachings on sexuality and warns that the church has become distracted by them. He attacks priests who won’t baptize children born out of wedlock for their “rigorous and hypocritical neo-clericalism.” He declares that God “has redeemed all of us … not just Catholics. Everyone, even atheists.” He posed with environmental activists holding an antifracking T-shirt and called on politicians and business leaders to be “protectors of creation.”

( MORE : Behind the Pope Francis Cover )

None of which makes him a liberal—he also says the all-male priesthood is not subject to debate, nor is abortion, nor is the definition of marriage. But his focus on the poor and the fact that the world’s poorest 50% control barely 1% of its wealth unsettles those who defend capitalism as the most successful antipoverty program in history. You could argue that he is Teddy Roosevelt protecting capitalism from its own excesses or he is simply saying what Popes before him have said, that Jesus calls us to care for the least among us—only he’s saying it in a way that people seem to be hearing differently. And that may be especially important coming from the first Pope from the New World. A century ago, two-thirds of Catholics lived in Europe; now fewer than a quarter do, and how he is heard in countries where being gay is a crime and educating women for leadership roles is a heresy may have the power to transform cultures in which Catholicism is a growing, even potentially liberating force.

These days it is bracing to hear a leader say anything that annoys anyone. Now liberals and conservatives alike face a choice as they listen to a new voice of conscience: Which matters more, that this charismatic leader is saying things they think need to be said or that he is also saying things they’d rather not hear?

The heart is a strong muscle; he’s proposing a rigorous exercise plan. And in a very short time, a vast, global, ecumenical audience has shown a hunger to follow him. For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year .

Person of the Year 2011

Introduction, cover story, to our readers, people who mattered, fond farewells, profiles of protesters.

No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters didn't just voice their complaints; they changed the world

• Person of the Year Introduction
• The Protester
• A Year in the Making
• William McRaven: The Admiral
• Ai Weiwei: The Dissident
• Paul Ryan: The Prophet
• Kate Middleton: The Princess
• Why TIME Chose 'The Protester'
• Why They Protest: Bahrain, Tunisia and Yemen
• Why They Protest: Egypt, Libya and Syria
• Why They Protest: American Movements
• The Making of 'The Protester' Portfolio
• The Media Messenger of Zuccotti Park
• Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshal
• Yukiya Amano
• Casey Anthony
• Essam el-Erian and Rachid Ghannouchi
• Bashar Assad
• Michele Bachmann
• Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
• Silvio Berlusconi
• Anders Behring Breivik
• Warren Buffett
• Herman Cain
• David Cameron
• Eric Cantor
• Chile's Student Protesters
• Hillary Clinton
• Jon Corzine
• Nafissatou Diallo
• Novak Djokovic
• Dr. Dieter Egli
• Recep Tayyip Erdogan
• Fukushima 50
• Muammar Gaddafi and Sons
• Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara
• Gabrielle Giffords
• Vince Gilligan
• Newt Gingrich
• Dr. Robert Grant
• Vic Gundotra
• Reed Hastings
• Anna Hazare
• Kim Jong Il
• Lisa Jackson
• Mustafa Abdul Jalil
• Kim Kardashian
• Hamid Karzai
• Gen. Ashfaq Kayani
• Amanda Knox
• Osama bin Laden
• Julius Malema
• Nuri al-Maliki
• Sergio Marchionne
• George R.R. Martin
• Andrew Mason
• Bill McKibben
• Angela Merkel
• Lionel Messi
• Dr. Virginia A. Moyer
• Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Hussein Tantawi
• Mike Mullen
• Richard Muller
• Rupert Murdoch
• Dr. Conrad Murray
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Dirk Nowitzki
• Barack Obama
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone
• Joe Paterno
• Vladimir Putin
• Aaron Rodgers
• Mitt Romney
• Dilma Rousseff
• Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Ingraffea, Robert Howarth
• Ali Abdullah Saleh
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Jerry Sandusky
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• Charlie Sheen
• Dominique Strauss-Kahn
• Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani
• Scott Walker
• Elizabeth Warren
• Kristen Wiig
• Michael Woodford
• Daniel Yergin
• Nick Ashford
• Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz
• Sathya Sai Baba
• Seve Ballesteros
• Derrick Bell
• Elena Bonner
• Warren Christopher
• Basil D'Oliveira
• Lawrence Eagleburger
• Necmettin Erbakan
• Loulou de la Falaise
• Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Geraldine Ferraro
• Theodore J. Forstmann
• Joe Frazier
• Lucian Freud
• Sidney Harman
• Vaclav Havel
• Christopher Hitchens
• M.F. Husain
• Franklin Kameny
• Shammi Kapoor
• Jack Kevorkian
• Jack LaLanne
• Jerry Leiber
• Sidney Lumet
• Wangari Maathai
• Anne McCaffrey
• Danielle Mitterand
• Harry Morgan
• Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu
• Lana Peters
• Pete Postlethwaite
• Cliff Robertson
• Dorothy Rodham
• Andy Rooney
• Jane Russell
• Ken Russell
• Randy Savage
• William Donald Schaefer
• Bert Schneider
• Gil Scott-Heron
• Sargent Shriver
• Fred Shuttlesworth
• Duke Snider
• Sócrates
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Grete Waitz
• Amy Winehouse
• Why I Protest: Dr. Arthur Chen of Oakland, Calif.
• Why I Protest: Chelsea Elliott of New York City
• Why I Protest: Olmo Gálvez of Spain
• Why I Protest: Ahmed Harara of Egypt
• Why We Protest: Natalia Klossa and Antonis of Greece
• Why I Protest: Wael Nawara of Egypt
• Why I Protest: Katerina Patrikarakou of Greece
• Why I Protest: Carmen Rodríguez of Spain
• Why I Protest: Javier Sicilia of Mexico
• The Martyr's Mother: An Interview with Mannoubia Bouazizi
• Mohamed Bouazizi's Unexpected Sequel: A Tunisian Soap Opera
• Crazy, Stupid, Cool

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The Winners of Our 3rd Annual Personal Narrative Essay Contest for Students

Eight short, powerful essays from teenagers about the moments, big and small, that have shaped them.

By The Learning Network

For a third year, we invited students from 11 to 19 to tell us short, powerful stories about a meaningful life experience for our Personal Narrative Writing Contest . And for a third year, we heard from young people across the globe about the moments, big and small, that have shaped them into who they are today: a first kiss that failed to meet expectations, a school assignment that led to self-acceptance, an incident at airport security that made the world look much less sweet, and more.

Our judges read more than 11,000 submissions and selected over 200 finalists — eight winners, 16 runners-up, 24 honorable mentions and 154 more essays that made it to Round 4 — whose stories moved us and made us think, laugh and cry. “I’m always blown away by the vulnerability and tenderness so many of these stories hold,” one judge commented.

Below, you can read the eight winning essays, published in full. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find the names of all of our finalists, or see them here in this PDF .

Congratulations, and thank you to everyone who shared their stories with us.

(Note to students: We have published the names, ages and schools of students from whom we have received permission to do so. If you would like yours published, please write to us at [email protected] .)

The Winning Essays

“the best friend question”.

• “504 Hours”
• “T.S.A. and Cinnamon Buns”
• “Lips or Slug?”
• “The Bluff”
• “Autocorrect”
• “Purple Corn”

By Blanche Li, age 13, Diablo Vista Middle School, Danville, Calif.

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The Person of the Year Essay

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Leonardo DiCaprio: A Tribute to an Icon of Our Time

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