15.03.05 - Pope Francis's Vatican Has Political Swagger

The new leader of the Catholic Church has used personal ties and the element of surprise to try to make political change

Nowhere is the contrast between Benedict XVI and Francis more tangible than in the degree to which the papacy seems to have recovered its diplomatic and geopolitical swagger. The normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba in December 2014 came about in part thanks to Francis, who wrote private letters to President Obama and Cuban president Raúl Castro that reportedly helped break the ice between the two leaders.

“Francis is not resigned to a passive vision of world affairs,” said Marco Impagliazzo, president of the Rome-based Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic organization active in conflict resolution and peace brokering, in a 2014 interview. “We must prepare for a new age of political audacity for the Holy See.”

Massimo Franco is one of Italy’s most respected journalists, a veteran reporter who has covered all of Italy’s political figures of the late 20th century. He believes that Francis is potentially even more crucial a political actor than John Paul II, who mobilized the solidarity movement and set the dominoes in motion that led to the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. “By virtue of being Polish, John Paul was hugely important for the fate of communism and for the reunification of Europe,” Franco said in 2014. “As the first pope from the developing world, Francis is important for every major issue facing the world today: poverty, the environment, immigration and war.”

While Francis clearly wants to deploy whatever influence he can to promote peace, the pontiff is selective about how, and how often, he wades into conflicts.

Looking back at John Paul II’s vain efforts to stop the Iraq offensive in 2003, which included dispatching personal envoys to both Sadaam Hussein and President George W. Bush in February and March of that year, Francis felt the intervention had been too political. It failed, in Francis’s eyes, to draw on what’s most distinctive about the papacy as a global force: its spiritual capacity. So Francis opted to do something only a religious leader could do: he called a global day of prayer and fasting for peace in Syria on Sept. 7, 2013, inviting the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, as well as all women and men of goodwill, to help him storm heaven with prayer.

In June 2014 Francis made an even riskier and more audacious diplomatic foray: an invitation to the presidents of Israel and Palestine to pray for peace in the Vatican, in an effort to revive the stalled peace process.

By now, Francis has demonstrated how he wants to engage the world as a peace pope. He approaches conflicts in a uniquely spiritual fashion. He wants to rely on the resources of faith—prayer and fasting, invocations of the sacred texts of the world’s great religions, and popular devotions and religious observances. In his eyes, it’s not only the appropriate way for a pope to exert his influence, it’s also good politics. Many of the world’s bloodiest conflicts have a clear religious subtext, which means that a spiritual leader can engage them in a fashion that no secular diplomat could.

The Francis brand of diplomacy is premised on personal relationships. American Catholic writer David Gibson refers to this one-on-one style as the “Francis doctrine,” citing the pope’s remarks immediately after his return from the Holy Land that peace is not mass-produced but “handcrafted” every day by individuals.

In the future, it’s reasonable to expect that Francis will pick where to deploy his political capital in part based on where he has developed personal ties.

Read the original news story here:
How Pope Francis’s Vatican Got Its Political Swagger Back