By Francis X. Maier, First Things - Airports harbor interesting stories. Here’s an example. On my way home from a speaking engagement recently, I spent time with a lay friend, a young scholar, while he waited for his flight. We fell to talking, and the conversation soon turned to the Church. Ten years earlier, he’d been working on his doctorate at a Jesuit university in the east. On the morning Pope Francis was elected, he bumped into an acquaintance, a prominent Jesuit scholar on the ecclesial left, and congratulated him on now having one of his own as pope.