The Safer Story

Pope Francis became TIME’s Person of the Year instead of Miley Cyrus, who was leading the online poll. Editors one, internet zero. He’d been Pope for nine months—came from Argentina in February when Benedict XVI stepped down—and he was already doing something different. Talking about the poor, saying he wouldn’t judge people for their sexuality. That wasn’t typical for the Vatican. People who’d written off institutional religion were paying attention.

TIME started picking a Man of the Year back in 1927, after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. They needed something to put on the cover, so they made him the year’s defining person. A hundred years later they still do it, still use it as this cultural pulse check.

Edward Snowden had leaked the NSA files earlier and basically showed that mass surveillance wasn’t a future threat anymore—it was here, woven into everything. That was real rupture. TIME could’ve picked him, made it about accountability and transparency. Instead they went with the Pope. Comfort instead of disruption. I don’t know if that was the right call, but it says something about what they wanted to recognize.