You may be infallible, but your scheduler? Not so much.

The itinerary for your highly anticipated trip to the United States this September defies belief: You are only visiting the Northeast. I guess it’s understandable that you’d attend a major conference on families in Philadelphia, and no one can begrudge you a Manhattan stop to address the United Nations General Assembly. But a D.C. visit to speak to a joint session of Congress? With all due respect to your considerable powers of persuasion, God himself couldn’t get through to those people.

The biggest sin in your schedule is one of omission: You’re not coming to California. Holy Father, that’s like visiting Italy without going near Rome. The scheduling omission is glaring for you in particular, for two reasons. First, your top priorities dovetail with California’s most serious problems. Second, there are controversies in California for which you bear responsibility and that require your attention.

The good news is there’s time to amend your schedule to add a California swing. And so, at the risk of seeming presumptuous, I’ve taken the liberty of drafting a California itinerary that should fit your needs, and ours:

You’d fly from the East to San Diego and head straight to Mission San Diego de Alcala, the first mission of Father Junipero Serra. Your plan to make Serra a saint on your U.S. visit this fall (which you revealed publicly just last month) has stirred up controversy here, given the decimation of the Indian population in Serra’s mission system. At the same time, this is a huge moment for Californians, all of whom are taught about Serra’s importance in grade school. Either way, making Serra a saint was a big decision, and you should own it by doing the canonization in California—and in San Diego County, home to several of our state’s Indian tribes.

From the mission, your next stop would be the U.S.-Mexico border, to reiterate your call for the better treatment of immigrants around the world, particularly for Mexicans who cross our border, and continue to be subjected to, in your words, “racist and xenophobic attitudes.” Another venue for making that exhortation could be up I-15 from San Diego in the Riverside County city of Murrieta, site of ugly protests against Central American refugees last year.

From Murrieta, you’d head west toward L.A. You could drop by the California Institution for Men in Chino—part of our state’s unconstitutionally overcrowded prison system—to wash prisoners’ feet, as you have done elsewhere. The Inland Empire, which has had serious economic struggles, might also be a good place for a Mass focused on the problems of the poor; California, after all, has the highest poverty rate under measures that account for cost of living and public assistance.

From there, onto Los Angeles, the nation’s largest archdiocese and entertainment capital, with so many channels to spread the good news. You could tango with Ellen and do Kimmel. If you’re homesick, the food journalist Javier Cabral suggests a couple of great restaurants in the area—Carlitos Gardel, an Argentine place on Melrose (great steaks cooked super juicy), and Union, in Pasadena, with handmade seasonal pasta and a “wine selection eccentric enough to impress a lifelong Malbec drinker.” And if you need to save a little coin on hotels, I’m sure Clooney would be happy to put you up at his place in Studio City.

Since climate change is a focus of yours in 2015 (how’s that encyclical coming?), you could then visit the state’s coastline up north, or better yet, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta, the great, underappreciated estuary and water source for the state. If you’re feeling ambitious, maybe you could try to pull together the battling stakeholders in California’s water wars together for meeting and prayer. It couldn’t hurt.

From there, you’d head to San Francisco for a thorny bit of administrative business. You’ve been trying to reform the church hierarchy—and one place that needs your firm hand is the San Francisco archdiocese.

The archbishop there, Salvatore Cordileone, has been busy alienating much of the Bay Area with conservative rhetoric and a stick-a-finger-in-their-eye style. In recent weeks, he’s gone after teachers at some of the state’s most revered Catholic high schools, demanding that they agree to morality clauses that oppose same-sex marriage, contraception, and reproductive technologies.

That may be church teaching, but this is the Bay Area, and Cordileone’s behavior clashes with your admonishment that the church’s shepherds should “smell like the sheep.” So why not transfer Cordileone to, say, Alabama and replace him with a more diplomatic, tech-savvy prelate who could credibly hold Silicon Valley titans accountable for their anti-social behavior? (Yep, I’m talking about you, Uber.)

Once you’ve finished that unpleasant task, you could take BART under the bay to Oakland, and talk Jesuit-to-Jesuit with another famously frugal chief executive, California Governor Jerry Brown. If you do, a word of warning: Don’t get this former seminarian started on St. Ignatius, whom he never seems to stop quoting. But he’s a lame duck, and you’ve got financial management problems at the Vatican. Maybe you could hook him up with a new gig before you head back to Rome?

You won’t regret it, Holy Father. You and California—it’s a match made in heaven.

Very truly yours,
Joe Mathews

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About three minutes after the news broke, my phone went hysterical, between the phone calls, e-mails, text messages, Whatsapp, and whatever other social networking systems people are using now. Friends, cousins, officemates, cab drivers, the people gathering outside the Buenos Aires Cathedral—suddenly there was nothing else to talk about. Before there could even be a conscious response, we all seemed to want to echo: Habemus Papum, with an emphasis on the “Habemus.”

He’s one of us, or at least, he seems as if he could be. A porteño (as Buenos Aires residents call themselves), a loyal fan of a local soccer team who is said to take the same subway we cram into every morning. In fact, since this announcement, it’s surprising how many people claim to have met him. If anecdotes are to be believed, he must have been one of the more social people in the city. The sincere, spontaneous outpouring of excitement, and joy even, was rather startling, as it enveloped not only the Argentine church establishment and its most faithful followers but also plenty of my progressive friends and associates who tend to spend more time opposing conservative social views than kneeling in Mass.

One typical email I received from a friend on the day of the announcement earnestly read: “I haven’t felt ‘Catholic’ in years, but I have a sudden urge to go to church. I wish I was kidding. I guess the fact that he’s from Argentina makes me feel closer to the church.” The bunting on the balconies throughout Buenos Aires these days speaks volumes about the national pride—Vatican yellow-and-white alongside the Argentine sky-blue-and-white.

Pope Francis admitted, as he was introduced in St. Peter’s Square, to coming from the end of the world, but, privately, we consider ourselves the center of the universe. And what more heavenly confirmation of this perception could anybody ask for? The endless formal news cycle—first words, what he wore, his messages (literal and symbolic) to the world—were also characterized by a general sense of bliss here at being somehow chosen. This was true even when passing notice was paid to critiques of Jorge Bergoglio’s history—including those having to do with what the Jesuit leader knew, and when did he know it, about the military dictatorship’s brutal Dirty War against opponents and civil society in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

For the moment, little can stand in the way of widespread euphoria at an Argentino making it on the global stage, especially one being lauded for his personal simplicity and charisma. Bergoglio’s ascension creates a formidable Argentine trinity on the global stage, joining soccer player Lionel Messi, the world’s greatest athlete, known also for his humble, unassuming personality; and Máxima Zorreguieta, the “commoner” who married a European (Dutch) prince. Who better to personify the “Argentine dream” than Bergoglio, born to immigrant parents in a humble Buenos Aires neighborhood and still able to rise to the very summit of world power?

But after the bunting is put away, and once the spontaneous gatherings at churches ebb, the question will remain: what will the impact be at home? How will a boost to the Catholic brand here affect national and local politics?

The role of the church in Argentine politics has never been a subtle one, though the population is increasingly secular and distanced from its Catholic heritage. The religion is constitutionally “sustained” by the national government, and until a 1994 reform, presidential candidates were required to be Roman Catholic. The church’s views have had considerable impact on public policy. The yellow-and-white draped muncipal buildings in Buenos Aires are a spontaneous display of state pride, but it’s hard not to see them as a declaration of support to a specific religion and the worldview it entails. The mayor of Buenos Aires declared Tuesday a school holiday, in honor of the papal inaugural mass. “The city,” according to a notification on a municipal website, “considers that the election of Pope Francis is one of the most important events in all of Argentine history, which amply exceeds the religious phenomenon.”

However well-intentioned, the celebration points in a troubling direction for those who hope to see progressive social measures continue to advance in Argentina. The fact is that the church has been losing more battles than it has been winning lately against the Peronist governments of the successive Kirchner presidents. It is hard to imagine any other country going from a late legalization of divorce (only in 1987!) to a national legalization of gay marriage (2010). Cardinal Bergoglio, not incidentally, called the gay marriage law “a maneuver by the devil.” Meanwhile, the creation of a national sex education policy has run afoul of traditional sensibilities and still has not been fully implemented in certain provinces.

While the progressive achievements of recent years, even where resisted, can no longer be revoked, the suddenly ubiquitous Francis memorabilia and papal yellow leads me to wonder about the fate of other uncertain measures floating around policy circles: regulation of surrogate parenting, assisted reproduction, and abortion.

Abortion is currently severely limited in Argentina, legally available only to mentally disabled women who have been victims of abuse or when the mother’s life is in danger. The church frequently condemns attempts to regularize access to abortions by victims of rape and minors. A recent and notorious example occurred in response to a Supreme Court decision last year, which determined that a 15-year-old victim of rape by her stepfather had not committed a crime by terminating her pregnancy.

These are, of course, polemic subjects in many countries, including the United States, where abortion is permitted on demand but hotly contested, and it would be unfair to claim that the conservative strain in Argentine society (which has stark regional contrasts, as you’d find elsewhere) can be blamed entirely on the church.

Nor could the Church be expected to support policies that are opposed to its theology. As a Jewish atheist, I have no desire to hold forth on Catholicism’s internal views. But insofar as these stances impact the national debate, I am concerned that a strengthening of support for the church might mean a step back from policies that have recognized important rights for minorities and women, and that could create a more equal and healthy society.

I hope that the new pope’s perspective on poverty gives a boost to political movements focused on economic distribution and the role of the state. I hope he inspires his followers to help others and to be better citizens. But I hope his influence remains in those areas, and that lawmakers follow other guidelines when it comes to determining policy.

As for the collective jubilation of this week, I am hoping it will turn out to be as fleeting as the tennis craze inspired by the late 1970s triumphs of Argentine pro Guillermo Vilas—a feel-good moment that has no lasting impact on the type of nation Argentina is becoming.

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