--- title: Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis | TIME description: TIME's Howard Chua-Eoan explains why Pope Francis is the Person of the Year.  canonical: https://time.com/video/zqtsa2U6/ og:title: Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis og:description: TIME's Howard Chua-Eoan explains why Pope Francis is the Person of the Year.  og:url: https://time.com/video/zqtsa2U6/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/zqtsa2U6/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis twitter:description: TIME's Howard Chua-Eoan explains why Pope Francis is the Person of the Year.  twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/zqtsa2U6/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis [Watch (HLS stream): Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/zqtsa2U6.m3u8) (2:55)  _Published 2013-12-11. TIME's Howard Chua-Eoan explains why Pope Francis is the Person of the Year._ --- Jul 27, 2023 4:00 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [TIME's 2013 Person of the Year: Pope Francis](/video/1rYj3kZp/) ### TIME's 2013 Person of the Year: Pope Francis [Why Olivia Pope Should be the Person of the Year](/video/vDZ5970Y/) ### Why Olivia Pope Should be the Person of the Year [Who Should Be TIME's 2010 Person of The Year?](/video/L68zaUg4/) ### Who Should Be TIME's 2010 Person of The Year? --- ## Transcript Pope Francis is TIME Magazine's 'Person of the Year'. He was the first Pope from the new world. Certainly the first from Latin America, that alone is historic. The fact that he comes at a time when the church seem to be needing a huge burst of energy. But then he has this charisma which seems to come out of nowhere. He's 77 years old, hence only, he is hugging people who you would not even want to touch. He is-- he is washing the feet of convicts, he is saying mass it for immigrants and it's this far away island in the middle of the Mediterranean. He says he wants a battlefield hospital church. Helping everyone who's in trouble, who is lonely, who needs an embrace. He is especially caring about the poor. That is the strongest message, and that is one that actually brings back so much of what the church has been trying to do with itself since the 1960s. There are several things that Francis has said that have basically excited a lot of people, Catholics and non- Catholics alike. When he was asked about homosexuals and gays, he said, 'who am I to judge'? When he talked about women who have had abortions and he said, we must always be aware of how much pain they have been through to go through all this. Same thing about divorced Catholics who remarry, then everyone starts to say, oh, he's going to allow a divorced Catholics to have communion, he is-- he's going to open the church to gay people, he is going to be much more open about abortions. But he, actually never said any of that. He was just being more open to these people are willing to come back to the Church without having to deal with the actual rules. And to see him be able to juggle all of these in the next year will be fascinating cause all the conservatives are watching him and worried that he's going to give away the authority of the Catholic Church. And all the liberals are worried that he's just going to say all these nice things and do nice gestures and not actually doing anything to change the church. So he has to balance up both sides. But the fact that he's given so many people so much hope and inspiration in the last nine months, don't even nine months. No one else has done that this year. And, and for that alone for certainly changing the way we think about the church and seemingly able to serve, even shift this 2000- year- old institution one way, he is 'Person of the Year'. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Person of the Year 2013: Why TIME Chose Pope Francis","description":"TIME's Howard Chua-Eoan explains why Pope Francis is the Person of the Year. ","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/zqtsa2U6/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-12-11T12:42:20.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/zqtsa2U6.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/zqtsa2U6/","duration":"PT2M55S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/zqtsa2U6/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```