Francis’ style: the holy see and its new role in the international system

Abstract

With the end of the bipolar system there began a reordering in the the relations of forces at the international level, mainly due to the emergence of new actors, mostly from the so-called periphery of the world. After 500 years of Western supremacy, the old centers of power - among which China stands out - appear to be returning to the international scene asking not only for a qualitative but also a quantitative inclusion within the international system, such as what occurred after the decolonization processes in Asia and Africa. It concerns to an international restructuring demand that takes into account the changes in this area since the end of World War II. In this scenario we find the first non-European pope emerges, the first Latin American. The new Head of the largest and most influential transnational religious actor seems to have opened a new stage of activity of the Catholic Church in the world, characterized by a less Eurocentric ideological shift and more favorable to the emergence of the outskirts, in line with the current demand for restructuring of the international system presented by peripheral nations. Through an international reading of Francis’ early pontificate years, combined with the analysis of global and regional context - with special emphasis on the situation in Latin America - that preceded it, this paper aims to highlight the important role that the Holy See can play in this current time of global reconfiguration, not only in the religious but also in the political sphere. This study also seeks to contribute to the construction of new conceptual categories that can explain the transnational religious actor’s role in an international system considered by most of international relations theories as a secular system and with a narrow space for the religious phenomenon. In the first part of the article, we will analyze the impact of the religious transnational actors’ presence in the context of the current international system in transition paying particular attention to the greatest actor transnational religion: the Catholic Church. In the second part, we will investigate the main changes ocurred in the composition and restructuring of the Roman Curia form 2013 to 2015. Further, we will examine some speeches and documents of Pope Francis and his new Secretary of State emphasizing the key-points of Pope Francis’ new diplomacy. Through this analysis, we will try to verify the hypothesis that in these first two years of the pontificate, Pope Francis seems to be performing an ideological shift of the Holy See, approaching the central structure of the Catholic Church, traditionally linked to national and international elites, to the outskirts of political and ecclesial world.