In the feverish information highway of instant mass communication it was perhaps inevitable that the meeting in Rome between Pope Francis and Barak Obama should lend itself to a plethora of comment, not always conceived or delivered in a spirit of generosity
Leading the cynical charge was the hawkish Fox TV whose panel of commentators suggested that the meeting has exposed a huge political and ethical gap between the two men on issues like abortion and contraception while failing to find common ground on anything of substance.
One of the Fox commentators drew a comparison between the lack of a clear ideological and ethical bonding and the meeting of minds to ‘bring down the Berlin wall” when Reagan met John Paul 11nd. Another lamented that Obama and the Pope had not taken the opportunity to issue a joint statement against “the terrorism of Islam.”
In fairness the TV images of the initial encounter suggested that Obama’s charm offensive – all smiles, lingering hand shake, and a litany of effusive thankyous- were not exactly reciprocated. The relaxed smile that has characterised this papacy on major public occasions seemed to have momentarily abandoned Pope Francis. He looked sullen and awkward as well as exhausted against a background of flashing camera lights and the general razzmatazz that accompanies any US president in the modern age. Earlier Pope Francis’s new cult of ecclesiastical austerity seemed under assault when Obama came through the Vatican gates with an imperial cavalcade of more than 50 vehicles.
“Several were packed with men dressed in black and, disconcertingly, wearing masks, “noted The Guardian’s John Hooper before adding, “It was not immediately clear if they were Italian Special Forces attempting to confuse potential terrorists or American secret agents trying to hide the effects of a more than usually gruesome hangover.”
Only later did both men seem more relaxed suggesting that the encounter behind closed doors had found more common ground than points of division. The Vatican officially devoted just five lines in its subsequent communique, stating broadly that the meeting had covered international conflict and the problems facing migrants. But Obama at a press conference seemed happy to share enough detail to suggest a convergence of interests on issues like the wish to find a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and a concern for the glaring inequalities of modern society.
This was a meeting between the first black president in the history of the United States and the first Pope from the developing world. . It is thus at the very least as deserving of hope in a new world order as that very different encounter in the later stages of the 20th century between Reagan and John Paul 11nd.
Undoubtedly Obama is no longer the global star he was when he last swept into the Vatican in 2009 and met Pope Benedict XV1. Equally Pope Francis’s star is a great deal higher than his predecessor’s ever was, and could claim to have restored the Papacy to its rightful chair of unrivalled spiritual leadership.
And yet this was a President that not only has a Catholic secretary of state trying to broker an enduring Middle East peace deal, but who is championing a reform of America’s broken immigration system and a redistribution of wealth to America’s working poor, as part of an unapologetic plan to use government activism to revive the US economy and build a fairer society in his second term.
If yesterday’s meeting stopped short of being historic it was because Pope Francis, who learnt his humility and political militancy from the shanty neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, is instinctively cautious when it comes to claims of ethical conduct emanating from the great capitalist superpower . After all, this a Pope that in his youth grew up in a time when Argentina’s populist leader General Peron turned the US into the convenient whipping of his country’s failed political culture.Francis still has some Peronismo flowing in his veins.
