For much of 2013, the world has been enchanted with Pope Francis, and the dramatic difference in style to that of his predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Style however is not substance, and a more complex question is, how does the substance of the two popes’ messages compare?

Some clues can be found at Viznary, where Chris Walker  has a visual depiction of the language used by Popes Benedict XVI, and Francis. In essence, his method produces a result that will be familiar to most blog readers - a couple of word clouds, which use variations in type size to indicate the relative frequency of the words used. To maintain reasonable comparability, he analysed only the first 104 official speeches made by Pope Francis, and the first 102 official speeches made by Pope Benedict. He then removed from the analysis the top five most frequently used words, which were the same for each (and likely to be so for any pope): God, Jesus, Lord, Christ, and Church. These initial results, done independently for each pope, produced very similar word clouds - see them at the viznary site.

More interesting, is the relative frequency of the usage of the words, by each pope. The charts below show, respectively, the words which Francis used rather more frequently than Benedict, and then those which were more frequently used by Benedict.

Words that Francis emphasized much more than Benedict XVI

Words that Benedict XVI emphasized much more than Francis

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