Judging by an image he posted of himself wearing a liturgical mitre and papal robes and his statements in recent days about his desire to become pontiff, US President Donald Trump seems to be taking an unusual interest in the Vatican’s role in world politics. But he’s not the only world leader with skin in the game.
At a time of great international tension, religious radicalisation and apocalyptic nuclear threats, the temptation for countries to influence the conclave is strong.
And while they’re going about it more discreetly than Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are reportedly trying to get a pontiff elected who would suit their priorities.
The rifts in the Western political order overlap with internal cleavages within the Vatican, which have seen the Catholic Church look further afield geographically and in terms of faith.
As a consequence, the cardinals choosing the next pope could be polarised between centralisers and internationalists, suggests Francesco Clementi, professor of comparative public law at Rome’s La Sapienza University.
“At the conclave there will be a clash between an interpretation of the Church based on a return to an idea of its central government and one according to which the European Church, faced with the crisis of the West, must somehow decentralise as much as possible,” he tells Euronews.
The reforms of the Church’s institutions initiated by the late pontiff were definitely moving towards the second hypothesis, that of the internationalisation of the Vatican’s executive and decision-making structures.
Pasquale Ferrara, Director General for Political Affairs and International Security at the Italian Foreign Ministry and professor of Diplomacy and Negotiation at Luiss University in Rome, said the internationalisation of the church’s elite has reached a tipping point.
“Pope Francis has appointed cardinals from the four corners of the world,” he explains. This multinational composition brings very different sensitivities into the conclave. I believe that this conclave will precisely have the role of bringing the peripheries of the world to Rome.”
In 2013, many observers called Pope Francis the “pope of the Americas”. In the US, both the faithful and the political establishment believed that with his appointment, the Vatican’s axis of power had shifted from traditional Eurocentrism to the American world.
But Pope Francis’ active and critical stances on subjects such as war, migrants’ rights, the social fractures of the current economic order, the church’s dialogue with China and Russia, and his willingness to criticise Israel frustrated some of their expectations.
“It is clear that all the values contained in the Encyclical Laudato Si’ contradict a socio-economic model that Pope Francis considers iniquitous: that of turbo-capitalism, environmental devastation and a kind of private Big-Tech neo-imperialism,” says Pasquale Ferrara.
These transnational issues are not just about one country, he explains, but are clearly central to the reality of life in the US.
“It is a bit reductive to think that it is about being for or against the United States.”
The conclave’s agenda
War and peace are political topics historically dear to all popes, but Pope Francis dispatched his diplomats to historically active mediation roles in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, going far beyond the commandment “thou shalt not kill”.
The late pontiff’s political positions attracted both criticism and enthusiasm. Vatican diplomats in some cases had to correct their pitch on certain of Pope Francis’ phrasings — such as “NATO barking at Russia’s border” — in which the Vatican seemed to place authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies on the same ethical level.
Professor Stefano Ceccanti, a constitutionalist and former member of the Italian parliament in the Democratic Party, described that model of engagement as “an excess of realpolitik”.
He contrasts the last pope’s tenure with a trend that began in 1965 with the Second Vatican Council, which opened up the church to modernity.
“On the wave of the affirmation of the Christian democratic parties in Europe and of the Catholic, democratic and anti-communist US President John F Kennedy, the Catholic Church and Pope Paul VI established that democracy is the political regime closest to evangelical ideals,” he tells Euronews.
Pope Francis’ openings and understandings with non-democratic countries, including Russia, China and others, have caused some consternation even within the church itself.
“In some cases perhaps the difference between the church’s need to coexist and interact with non-democratic countries, such as China, and the awareness of the differences (substantial for the doctrine of the church itself) between established democracies and non-democratic regimes has not been well understood,” says Ceccanti.
At Pope Francis’ funeral, Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy conversed in a chapel of St Peter’s Basilica. They did so beside a section of the ancient sarcophagus of the emperors Hadrian and Otto that was transformed into a baptismal font at the end of the 17th century, a time of political triumph for the Jesuit tradition to which the late pope belonged — years in which the order founded by St Ignatius of Loyola exerted great political and cultural influence on both the major European courts and remote areas of the world that Europeans were exploring.
There were also fleeting appearances at the discreet US-Ukraine talks in St Peter’s by Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while a third chair was left vacant.
Some commentators joked about it that the seat was not actually empty, but occupied by the Holy Spirit, the Trinitarian entity that supposedly inspires the cardinals in the election of popes. Perhaps the Art of the Deal would extend to a joint venture with the Holy Spirit for control of the future papacy.
The secretary of state, cardinal elector and among the papal candidates, Pietro Parolin, will have favoured a meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy in a relaxed atmosphere. But Trump had already revised certain of his positions towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Diplomacy and decentralisation
In the case of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Cardinal Parolin and British Archbishop Richard Gallegher have always made it clear that Moscow is the aggressor and have affirmed Kyiv’s right to defend itself, says Ceccanti, who points out that “the council works with the concept of ‘legitimate defence’, a more restrictive idea than ‘just war'”.
On the matter of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two cardinals have effectively realigned Vatican policy with the positions of the European Union and the UK.
Yet the increasing prominence of the so-called periphery of the Catholic Church is also important to the revitalisation of Rome and Europe, the traditional centre of its historical and spiritual action.
Ceccanti concludes that as the internationalisation of the church grows, respect for local diversity must also grow. “We will have to get used to having solutions on some issues that are a little more decentralised and diversified,” he says.
A big question hovers over the conclave: will the future pontiff’s approach to the international order continue the reforms initiated by Pope Francis, or will he take a step back and focus on traditional political relations with Western powers as in the days of Benedict XVI and John Paul II?
The latter was every bit as active as Pope Francis in international politics, and is even credited as one of the architects of the end of communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
Cardinal Parolin, one of those tipped as a potential new pontiff, has laid the foundations for a new Vatican international policy. But many observers reckon that the new composition of the conclave, with many cardinals from previously remote parts of the world, could offer up many surprises.
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