On February 11th 2013, the Roman Catholic Church was stunned at the announcement that Benedict XVI was resigning from the papacy, the first pope to do so since the 13th century. His successor was, in some ways just as much a papal innovator, for Pope Francis was a Jesuit, a member of the religious order that had introduced mass evangelism into Catholicism in order to revive and restore the Catholicity of both the individual and the institutional church at a time when it was being attacked by the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century. His first apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium has the same purpose:

This could have been used as a mission statement for the English Catholic Church of 1779 when it began to emerge from the penal times where the custodians of the faith were mainly, but not exclusively, the local gentry and their households. One hundred years later, it was taking its place as a major Christian force in England that would continue to grow during the twentieth century and which, as well as looking after their spiritual well-being, would speak out on behalf of its adherents on political issues relating to social justice and education.

Later in his exhortation, Pope Francis speaks of his dream of how this will be achieved and it is quite clear that what would drive it was the twenty-first century equivalent of the Jesuit mission that helped fuel the Counter-Reformation by reviving and restoring the Catholic faith and practice in Europe.