Why Washington and the Vatican Don’t See Eye to Eye
The Holy See and the United States once had a close partnership. Under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, for instance, the CIA provided regular briefings to Pope John Paul II, as the Vatican coordinated with Washington to support democratic change in Poland. Those days are now over.
Nothing exemplifies the decline of this special relationship like Pope Francis’ diplomacy in Ukraine. In the last year, U.S.-Russian rivalries have played out in that country through the division between factions of the Orthodox Church. In the last year, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decisively split from the Moscow patriarchate, with the explicit approval of the United States. Francis did not follow the U.S. lead and instead cautioned Ukrainian Catholics not to meddle in the Orthodox proxy war. The pope has used his relationships with important players on all sides of the dispute—including in Moscow—to calm nerves. He has succeeded insofar as he has coaxed the antagonists into seeing one another’s humanity, which cut through the hostility in turn.
Francis’ discreet, behind-the-scenes mediation is of a piece with the approach to diplomacy he outlined in Evangelii Gaudium, his first papal exhortation, in 2013. In that exhortation, Francis emphasized four principles: that the whole is greater than the part, that unity prevails over conflict, that realities are more important than ideas, and that time is greater than space. Although abstract on first glance, the rules genuinely summarize his strategy, and reflect his desire to remain neutral among competing geopolitical powers, including the United States. This neutrality, in turn, is helping to restore the Holy See to its status as a major diplomatic player.
WHOLE AND FREE
Francis’ first guiding principle—that the whole is greater than the parts—can be seen in his reluctance to take sides within Ukraine’s religious conflict. Catholics make up no more than ten percent of Ukraine’s population, but they have long played an outsized role shaping national identity. The largest Catholic community is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), created in 1596 when a group of Orthodox bishops agreed to recognize Rome while maintaining Byzantine-rite liturgy. (Ukraine also has much smaller Latin and Ruthenian Catholic communities—a legacy of western Ukraine’s history as Polish and Austro-Hungarian territory.)
The UGCC has firmly attached itself to the pro-Western side of Ukraine’s internal conflict. One might have expected Francis to do so as well. In Buenos Aires, he was friendly with a UGCC archbishop, a former Soviet soldier named Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who at that time served a sizable Argentine diaspora. Shevchuk now leads the UGCC and was a prominent supporter of the 2014 Maidan protests that touched off the current conflict. Shevchuk has encouraged Christians to confront “terrorist violence and overt military aggression from abroad,” a clear reference to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.
The pope has rejected Shevchuk’s confrontational approach. When the archbishop described the conflict as a Russian “invasion,” Francis responded by condemning it as a “fratricidal war.” In February 2015, the pope politely told his Ukrainian bishops to stay out of politics, explaining that “the sense of justice and truth, before being political, is moral.”
For Francis, all conflict can be traced to interests, whether military, economic, or those related to national pride. But he is no more suspicious of Russian imperialism than of what he sees as U.S. imperialism—both Moscow and Washington, in his view, are equally self-interested and destructive. He therefore refuses to prioritize one group of Christians over another. The whole of Christianity is sacred, so peace must be found among its warring parts.
THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH
Francis’ second principle emphasizes unity over conflict. The unity he means to preserve is not only among fellow Catholics but also between Catholics and their Orthodox brothers.
Eastern Orthodoxy is a family of 14 autonomous local churches. The largest of these is the Russian Orthodox Church, with more than 100 million believers. In the 1960s, Rome sought to heal the schism with Eastern Orthodoxy, but the Russian church was locked behind the Iron Curtain. Pope Paul VI made peace with Athenagoras, the patriarch of Constantinople and “first among equals” within international Orthodoxy. In tandem, the U.S. government, which did not trust the communist-controlled leaders of the Russian church, promoted Athenagoras, a U.S. citizen, as global Orthodoxy’s main man. When Athenagoras was chosen as patriarch in 1949, he arrived in Istanbul on President Harry Truman’s presidential plane.
Pope Francis has grown particularly close to the current patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. They’ve traveled together in the Holy Lands and Greek islands and visited each other at home, and this June Francis gave a relic of St. Peter to Constantinople. Yet Francis and his diplomats are also close to Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church. In this, he builds on the work of his two predecessors: in 1989, Pope John Paul II agreed to restore some diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, and in 2010, Benedict XVI—who saw a deeply Christian Russia as an ally against the secular relativism of western Europe—fully normalized relations between Moscow and the Holy See.
In the Vatican’s view, the United States’ post–Cold War foreign policy has been overly militaristic and dismissive of the benefits of peaceful diplomacy. There have been notable exceptions—Rome strongly supported the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran and its rapprochement with Cuba. In general, however, the Holy See is concerned that the United States has stopped exercising its once significant moral influence as a country striving to calm nerves, encourage liberal order, and facilitate peace, opting instead for counterproductive bellicosity.
This article was published by UCA News on the 5th of September 2019.