Pope Francis is playacting realpolitik

George Weigel, Chicago Tribune

Image from, under the headline: What Pope Francis did when guards tried to stop these Chinese pilgrims

Excerpt:

It has been insufficiently remarked that the opening of the Second Vatican Council -- the four-year meeting of all the world's Catholic bishops that became the most important event in Catholic history since the Reformation and set the foundations for Catholicism's current role as a major institutional promoter and defender of human rights -- coincided precisely with the Cuban missile crisis. Pope John XXIII and the Vatican diplomatic corps were sufficiently shaken by the possibility of a nuclear war that might have ended Vatican II before it got underway that they devised a profound redirection of Vatican diplomacy toward the European communist world. This became known as Vatican Ostpolitik, and its principal agent was the career Vatican diplomat Archbishop Agostino Casaroli.

Casaroli's Ostpolitik, which unfolded during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), aimed at finding a modus non moriendi, a "way of not dying" (as Casaroli frequently put it), for the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain. In order to appoint bishops, who could ordain priests and thus maintain the Church's sacramental or spiritual life under atheist regimes, the Vatican ended the anti-communist rhetoric that had characterized its public diplomacy in the 1950s, removed senior churchmen who refused to concede anything to communist governments (like Hungary's Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty and Czechoslovakia's Cardinal Joseph Beran), discouraged any public role for exiled Catholic leaders like Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, urged underground Catholic clergy and laity to cease their resistance to their local communist regimes, and diligently sought various forms of agreements with communist governments. One premise informing this remarkable volte-face was that the Vatican's once-harsh anti-communist rhetoric had been at least partially to blame for communist regimes' persecution of the Church; the theory was that if the Vatican showed itself more accommodating (the buzzword was "dialogue"), such mellowness would be reciprocated.

It wasn't. And by any objective measure, Casaroli's Ostpolitik was a failure -- and in some instances a disaster. ...

The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as Pope Francis in March 2013 has not changed the "Casarolian" cast of mind dominating Vatican diplomacy; quite the opposite, in fact. Bergoglio brought to the papacy a record of resistance to the authoritarian Kirchner regime in his native Argentina, with which he had tangled on several issues. But he had no experience of world politics, and from the outset of his pontificate, Francis made it clear that he believed that "dialogue," perhaps his favorite word when speaking of international affairs, is possible with the likes of Vladimir Putin , Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and Raúl Castro.

Thus under Francis, the accommodating Casaroli approach to Vatican diplomacy has made a great comeback, while the world-changing achievements of John Paul II, the result of charismatic moral leadership, seem to be virtually ignored by the Church's senior diplomats. And one result of that comeback is the new démarche with China, which the senior Italians among the Vatican's diplomats regard as a rising world power with whom they must be a "player." ...