The Pope Who Made Atheists Look Twice

TIME’s Person of the Year tradition started as an act of editorial embarrassment management. In 1927 the magazine had failed to put Charles Lindbergh on the cover after his transatlantic flight, and naming him Man of the Year at year’s end was a quiet way to make amends. Nearly a century later it remains one of the few cultural temperature gauges that can still generate a real argument.

This year the argument was Snowden. He did the thing—handed the world evidence that the NSA had been hoovering up everything, that the era of private communication was essentially finished, and that governments had decided this was fine. TIME gave the cover to Pope Francis instead. You can see the logic: Francis spent 2013 systematically dismantling the Vatican’s reputation for institutional cruelty in a way that felt genuinely surprising. He replaced the retired Benedict XVI in February and spent the rest of the year saying things that made conservatives in his own church deeply uncomfortable—a reliable sign that someone is doing something right.

Miley Cyrus led the public poll, which is not binding, which is perhaps the sanest editorial decision TIME makes all year.

The Snowden omission is the real story, though. The man triggered the most significant public debate about surveillance, privacy, and state power in a generation—and got passed over in favor of institutional symbolism. I don’t disagree with the Francis choice. But leaving Snowden off says something about what even sympathetic Western media is willing to celebrate versus merely cover.