According to the managing editor, deciding on Time’s person of the year is “not about how good or bad someone has been but how much of a difference they’ve made.” So who has followed in the footsteps of Joseph Stalin, Mark Zuckerberg, and last year’s winner – Barack Obama?

It may come as a surprise to learn that Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2013 is none other than Pope Francis.

He’s spent only nine months in office, but in that time he has surprised the world, and indeed the Vatican itself, with his unprecedented levels of tolerance.

Time’s managing editor Nancy Gibbs said:

Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly – young and old, faithful and cynical.

For one thing, he crushed the churlish non-tolerance of homosexuality in the Vatican when he said that if the church neglects to find a “new balance” regarding gays, abortion, and contraception, its moral foundation will “fall like a house of cards.”

He also won over the hearts of many when he delivered a sermon to an estimated three million people on Brazil’s Copa Cabana beach.

Nancy Gibbs went on to say that:

In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very centre of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalisation, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power.

Unsurprisingly, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was runner-up.

[Source : BBC]