Over at the New Yorker blog, you can view photographs of Pope Francis "through the years"; my favorite, which shows him commuting on the Buenos Aires subway in 2008, when he was a Cardinal and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, is above. The current pope appears to have more in common with the "nuns on the bus" than with, say, the Archbishop of the Twin Cities Diocese, who ought to be arrested and prosecuted for obstruction of justice.
I like a big shot who uses public transportation, and I'm not the only one. Richard Feynman, about whom I wrote here, reported in one of the autobiographical vignettes collected in What Do You Care What Other People Think? that he knew a certain general and fellow member of the commission investigating the Challenger disaster was a good fellow when he (the general) broke away from the first meeting to catch a train back to the Pentagon.
My advice:
When someone arrives in a limo, take everything they say with half a salt shaker. But pay attention to the speech acts of anyone who takes the bus.
