The balance of numbers

So busy in recent days, my Twitter feed and Facebook also suffering long leaves of absence.  Anyway to put things in context.  Paris gets flooded by over four million people showing solidarity with "the principles of the French Republic" on a cold but dry January day.  This past weekend, Pope Francis has attracted six million people in the Philippines for his open air mass despite atrociously wet weather.  The publisher of Charlie Hebdo marvelled at how his "atheist magazine" (a quaint term redolent of Eastern European communist regimes) was experiencing more miracles "than all the saints and prophets combined."  Two million extra people than the French capital could muster beg to differ.  Pope Francis is proving to be an even bigger rock star than Pope John Paul II and with his understated, progressive charisma, he is turning the Roman Catholic Church by degrees into an organisation fit for the third millennium.  Long may his tenure continue.