Society needs virtuous people more than it needs laws.

The best way to describe how I felt when I first became a mother is invisible. I went from going to meetings, lectures and libraries, where people would show interest in me and my work, to being stuck in our apartment with round the clock feedings and baby care. I didn’t see many people, and, more to the point, not many people saw me.

But it wasn’t just that kind of invisible. It was that no one was in the least bit interested in the fact that I had a baby. In a way, this was a good thing. Families are a private affair, and I was free to have one. And yet, it was this freedom, I felt, which also made me invisible. I was free to raise my child as I saw fit. The flip side was that no one cared. They cared about my academic work. But they didn’t care about this work.

When I was a small boy in grade school, we had no cartoons of naked men and women, boys and girls, strutting and slouching across the pages of “health” books. We had no sly suggestive come-ons into the world of porn and trivial sex. We were not encouraged to abuse ourselves, or given hints as to how many ways we could do it, or with whom. We did not know that our bodies were tools for mutual and meaningless seizing and consumption.

We were not, in other words, the objects of massive, publicly sponsored, selfish, soul-flattening child abuse.

An authentic knowing and love for Jesus must animate a sowing of the Eucharistic encounter.

This encounter in faith, explained Pope Francis, always leads a Christian to move outward toward others.

“Faith always leads to witness. Faith is a meeting with Jesus Christ, with God, and it is born from that and leads you to witness.”

Pope Francis's game plan is a stunning and inspiring document.

I have read many Papal documents. I am a Catholic and a journalist and it comes with the territory. But never, ever, have I read anything as stunning as Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), the first major document penned by Pope Francis.

There is nothing new in Evangelii Gaudium. Nothing at all. Perhaps that is the secret of its charm and power. It is a challenge for Christians to scrape back the layers of paint and dust and soot which have darkened the glowing light of the Gospel message.