Timothy Burns
Appearances
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
This pope, who has a great interest in migration... granted political asylum to 12 migrants a number of years ago and invited them to live within the confines of Vatican City, of which he is the sort of absolute political head.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
No one would listen to someone who was the sovereign leader of a 110-acre microstate in Italy, right? I mean... You know, nobody knows who the leadership of Andorra is. But when it comes to the pope as the head of the Holy See, the leader of a huge transnational religious institution, that's where he gets his kind of political background, cachet, however you want to put it.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
The idea that people might listen to him as a moral authority is as the leader of the church.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
Yeah. Well, I think I would make a distinction if I could between the two in the sense that he uses his diplomatic powers formally and legally in certain ways that I'll get to in a moment. But when it comes to his sort of soft power, moral megaphone, leader of the Catholic Church and sort of religious spokesman, I think he's made it pretty clear over the course of his papacy that
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
That he wants to direct the interests of the church and whatever authority he has as the church's leader towards certain issues that he defines in certain ways. And the clearest one of those is his reaction to climate change. He defines climate change as a moral issue.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
where what he calls the marginalized of society who suffer the most from the ravages of climate change have played the least role in bringing it about. So I think he wants to, in identifying himself and his church with what he calls the people at the margins, he looks for issues like climate change to say, this is not a scientific problem. This is a moral problem.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
And he really wants to put it at the foot of the industrialized world to say, you have caused this problem. These people are suffering because of it. What are you going to do about it?
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
Yeah, I think the example of Cuba is a very, very good one because it shows that only he, really only he, could play that kind of role in total secrecy and using formally the diplomatic pouch of the Holy See to communicate or to mediate communications between Raul Castro and Barack Obama.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
not only in the kind of, well, we can trust the Pope not to reveal our secrets, but to actually have diplomatic pouch and communication that could go through the Holy See. But that's only a kind of a most obvious example. When Julia Assange released WikiLeaks, there was a whole trench of documents that came to be called VataLeaks, where it showed that Institutions like the U.S.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
State Department, across a number of presidential administrations, were actually in far more constant and deep interaction with the Holy See than I think people like me thought they were. Just addressing all kinds of issues that was thought to be of shared interest between the church and the U.S. government, where the church could say,
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
as I think it was the Bush administration said, use their moral voice at the UN and in diplomatic terms where we could be more sort of straightforwardly political about it. So there weren't examples where this outcome was different than the outcome necessarily because the pope or the holy see weighed in. But they're very much involved in things –
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
involving poverty, war and peace, what this pope calls gender ideology, which would be sort of one of their conservative bents. They were very deeply involved in international UN conferences on women, on family planning, etc. So they sort of have a seat at the table that no other religious institution or really no other NGO could even aspire to.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
Well, I think his emphases have been different. And I think the sort of shorthand and a way simplistic way would be to say that John Paul II was Karol Wojtyla of Poland and Francis I is Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina. So they have different sort of political emphases.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
John Paul II, much more interested in the Cold War and Francis, much more interested in this kind of identification of the church with the marginalized in the ways that I think he became famous for articulating in Argentina.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
The other thing that's different though, and it intersects, as I said before, with the leadership of the church, John Paul II was not only comfortable with, but aggressively sought to a kind of personal identification of the Catholic Church with him.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
where Francis has expressed his kind of interest in synodality, as he calls it, where he calls these meetings to Rome and laypersons, clergy, bishops, etc., have been discussing with him issues facing the church.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
It doesn't mean that he listens to them or that he changes church's practice based upon what they say, but he's not constantly traveling to other countries, constantly asserting himself as the leadership of the church in every one of his institutional contexts.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
For me, it's this idea that the church that he leads should be seen as what he calls a field hospital for the poor and the marginalized. Whether he's always succeeded in that, whether he's been able to successfully direct the entire church both in Rome and outside of Rome in that direction. But this is where he gets his strong positions on climate change and migrants.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
That he believes that the church ought to be associated with those people. The church ought to be using its resources both culturally. financial, institutional, and this enormous soft power resource that he claims to be focused on the marginalized and the poor, and that every issue that comes along ought to be worked through that frame.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
I think that's what he decided the day he became Pope, and I think that has been his agenda throughout. Now, there have been problems with that, one being that he leads a very large, complicated church with its own institutional resistance to him. So he finds himself in a kind of a particularly difficult position within the church and speaking from the church.
Consider This from NPR
The political power of the pope
But I have no doubt that that's what he thinks that his legacy ought to be, that those have been his emphases.