Hidden behind the emotion of hundreds of thousands of faithful and the respect of global leaders – loves and not so much – a small but eloquent irony surrounded the goodbye to the Pope.
In 2013, Jorge Bergoglio became a pontiff with the asset and fundamental support of the American cardinals. The Church of the United States, one of the richest and most influential together with the German, saw in the then archbishop of Buenos Aires the opportunity for renewal and freshness that the Vatican needed to reverse the bleeding of faithful.
In 2025, That same church presses, on the other hand, by an anti-Franciscoa new more traditional and conservative pope and less open with the rights of homosexuals and migrants and with social justice.
The turn is not unanimous; A branch of US cardinals and bishops aligns even behind Bergoglio’s progressivism. But it is a turn that nakes religious, political and ideological tensions that growing the Church and also American voters. last year, Donald Trump won 59% of Catholic suffragethat historically leaned for the Democrats.
Polarization exceeds the United States; No pause, sits in the West and wears out their democracies. Between 2012 and 2013, global democracy reached its highest levels, due to the amount of population that covered and for the quality of the institutions, according to the prestigious V-Dem index. Today those standards fell to floors registered in 1978, in full decade of autocratic boom.
The abyss that separates the world that received Francisco and the one who fired him feeds on much more than polarization. Unbeliented and without representation, societies bet on the magical solutions of the outsiders. The number of conflicts increases and global fragmentation prevents finding international agreements to stop them. Resented by the pandemic, the world economy does not take off and poverty is strengthened. The rivalry between China and the United States threatens to break its containment margins to transform into a total cold war.
All these crises already hinted in 2013, but exploited with full strength to sink the world in uncertainty in recent years. Francisco’s mandate, as the papacy assume was to revitalize the church, not to end all the planet’s problems.
Like John Paul II, Bergoglio, however, put on the political leader suit And he appealed to the greatest weapons of a spiritual boss – the capacity for reconciliation, the appeal to consciousness and the heart and the invocation of forgiveness – to close international and social cracks in the world.
He barely succeeded, partly for his own errors and partly because no global leader or any government has the ability and means of solving a crisis. Francisco, like the rest of the world leaders, was caught by the traps of a boiling planet.
That naked papal impotence a challenging legacy for the next pontiff. How can Bergoglio’s successor approach his faithful, make them feel content and accompanied by global crises when the lack of influence of the Vatican and the papal word has been so exposed?
When Bergoglio assumed, two crises appeared: Venezuela and Syria. In the first, Hugo Chávez had just died and Nicolás Maduro was preparing to face Henrique Capriles in presidential elections. In the second, Bashar al-Assad gave free rein to violence to suppress the Arab spring Syrian version, which had begun two years before.
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With their exodus of migrants and with the explicit violence of war and repression, both revealed the world and Francisco in the following years. Francisco did not hesitate to get directly involved in both. His first direct intervention in Syria was a global prayer to advocate for peace and dissuade Barack Obama to bomb Syria after Al-Assad attack his own population with gas. In Venezuela, the Vatican led twice the dialogue between Maduro and the opposition to stop dictatorial drift.
Both interventions earned Francisco few successes and many criticisms. His Vatican adopted ambiguity as a diplomatic tactic, a frequent equidistance in countries that are proposed as mediators. That decision, however, was confused with a complacency with dictators not typical of a religious leader always willing to denounce inequities and oppression. That shadow finished settling with Bergoglio’s initial silence before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and, even though the Pope condemned weeks later to Putin, he could never dissipate.
Francisco personally involved in other conflicts: Cuba, Middle East and Sudan. Everyone traveled and in all cried out for peace, diplomacy and reconciliation. They all threatened to listen and access it, but they did it only for a moment. Trump’s arrival ended the thaw between Cuba and the United States; The Sudanese Civil War brutally revived in 2023, and Palestinians and Israeli live their worst chapter of violence after the massacre of Hamas in Israel.
The diplomatic ineffectiveness of the Vatican speaks of both Bergoglio’s mistakes and a world of dynamic dynamics difficult to reverse and limited governance leaders. The number of violent conflicts went from 35 in 2013 to 60 in 2024the highest level since the end of World War II, according to the latest annual report of the Oslo Peace Research Institute.
The reasons? Internal crises are internationalized, non -state actors – such as narco groups in Latin America – are more and more in violence, historical clashes are enhanced, explains the report.
If the diplomatic effort proves useless, what will be the place where the next Pope will be planted to approach such an unattainable, altered and unpredictable world?
Well above his diplomatic vocation, Francisco faced the world in his role as pastor. It was a resounding and necessary voice to concentrate attention to the phenomena of the 21st century that most shake the margins, “the last”, as the “Pope of the People” called them. His main flags were the care of millions of migrants expelled from their homes for poverty and violence and the fight against climate change.
The world seemed to listen to it. In the early years of their pontificate, both flags had their milestones in a Europe that, in 2015 and by Angela Merkel, opened to migrations and on a planet that joined the environmental degradation in the Paris Agreement, of 2016.
That also lasted little. Cultural wars and conservative reaction today force the world to retrace the path of flexible borders and energy transitionamong other things.
However, extreme weather phenomena will continue, warn the UN again and again, and migrants will not stop at strict borders, they will simply seek new destinations.
Those challenges will persist and others will be added. Technological acceleration threatens to turn the world of work and create new inequalities. The dissolution of the alliances of the POS Second War force more countries to evaluate nuclear options and proliferation again takes strength.
More social disruption. More geopolitical alteration. Diplomatic influence faded, weakened the power of moral and spiritual persuasion of papal flags, What weapons will have the next Pope to navigate the world and contain the anguish of his faithful?
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