Pope Francis on Wednesday was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year, saying that the Pontiff had instilled "fairness and justice, transparency, modernity" in his nine months in office as the head of the Catholic Church.
TIME's managing editor Nancy Gibbs wrote:
"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."Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly -- young and old, faithful and cynical -- as 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."
Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the newsmagazine that features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."
The list includes Charles Lindbergh (1927), Mahatma Gandhi (1930), Chiang Kai-shek (1937), Adolf Hitler (1938), Mark Zuckerberg (2010) and US president Barack Obama (2012).