DQ in the News: Pope Francis as Don Quixote

The Irish Independent today used two literary images to describe Pope Francis's attempts to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. On the one hand, he is compared to the heroic horsemen of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade."

An heroic poem proclaims that “Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred”.
And into the Vatican at Christmas boldly rode Pope Francis.

On the other hand, perhaps the Pope is more like everyone’s favorite misguided knight:

But some fear that Pope Francis is less like an heroic horseman in braided uniform than a well-intended Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. 

Inspired by noble ideas, but aided only by the simple Sancho Panza, Spain's Don Quixote set out to undo wrongs and to defend the helpless before things went wrong and he ended up attacking mills that he mistook for giants.

But people always forget that it wasn’t just noble ideas that inspired Don Quixote. In addition to the lofty ideas we must remember that he found those ideas in bad literature that drove him crazy.