God Wills Everyone Saved

This sky brought me up short as I drove into town today. (Clicking on picture enlarges it.)
Our Holy Father Francis is getting a lot of good attention from the media.  Much of what he says is treated as if it were foreign to Catholic tradition.  A recent surprise was last week in a letter to a professed atheist in a Roman newspaper where he said that God's mercy "does not have limits" and therefore it reaches non-believers, too, for whom sin would not be the lack of faith in God but, rather, failure to obey one's conscience. (John Allen, National Catholic Reporter, September 11). 
In next Sunday's 2nd reading St. Paul writes to Timothy, "God our Savior wills everyone to be saved. (2:3)"  Especially since the middle of the 20th century Catholic theologians have been writing about universal salvation.  As is expected of a church leader, our Holy Father has been reading these theologians and is offering us a clear explanation of what they have been saying.
When I was in the seminary more than 50 years ago I remember reading a letter a theologian wrote to a college student about God's will to save everyone.  He simply asked the student to use his reason and think about all the human beings who had existed before Jesus and all the human beings in the world since Jesus, who never knew him.  Then the theologian asked the student if he thought it made sense for God to go to all the trouble in the Old and New Testaments, including sending his Son to die on the Cross, to save only the tiniest fraction of the whole human race.
Who would want a God, he asked, who was so stingy and so foolish?