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Pope Francis and the limits of candor

John Berwick
John Berwick
Commentary
September 22, 2015

This pope, who once befriended the slum-dwellers of Buenos Aires, speaks and acts from the heart - which impresses and inspires many. But it's hardly a recipe for successful diplomacy, says DW’s John Berwick.

https://p.dw.com/p/1Ga9p
Pope Francis in Havana
Image: Reuters/A. Martinez Casares

The Vatican has been credited with bringing about a new climate of détente between Washington and Havana, but Pope Francis himself is no diplomat. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Popes in the past have often been better at maneuvering on the political stage than bearing witness to the gospel. Pope Francis' diplomatic awkwardness is actually refreshing, but it has a price.

As an advocate of the poor, he castigated financial speculators and called their greed “the devil's dung.” That tough talk provoked some conservative Republicans in the US to label him a crypto-communist. They began grumbling about his being invited to address the US Congress, the first pope ever to do so. Then, as if deliberately making matters worse, Francis announced that he would be stopping off in Cuba on his way to Washington. To conservatives on Capitol Hill, it must have seemed like salt in their wounds. The very least they expected of him now was to speak out in defense of pro-democracy activists in Cuba and castigate the Castro regime for its suppression of civil rights.

Meanwhile, seasoned diplomats at the Vatican were reputedly urging the pope not to endanger their progress in talks with Havana by showing open sympathy for the dissidents. It was a classic dilemma, and we can well imagine how Francis, a man inspired by the injunction in the Sermon on the Mount, “Let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no,” sought in vain for a solution that would be fair and just to all parties.

John Berwick is DW's religious affairs correspondent

In the end, the Vatican diplomats persuaded him not to include a meeting with the dissidents in his official schedule, while promising to organize a “spontaneous” encounter on the sidelines of his visit. Sadly, that didn't work out. It seems that Cuba's state security was one jump ahead of them, and the dissidents were arrested on the way.

This puts Pope Francis in the invidious position of appearing to go easy on the Cuban regime while lambasting capitalism, which is certainly not what he intends. Nevertheless, he will have to pay the price of being misunderstood.

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