Trust Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez to use her first audience with Pope Francis to press her country’s claim over the Falklands Islands.
With the demagoguery that has has marked her time in office,Fernandez has seized the opportunity to try and restore her own dwindling popularity by raising a cause that Argentines have historically rallied around.
This is the same President that has viewed Jorge Bergoglio as an opponent when he served as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires and has allowed her allies in the Argentine media to try and wreck his reputation by claiming, unjustly, he was complicit in the military regime’s dirty war.
Quite apart from the evident whiff of hypocricy surrounding La Presidenta’s latest cynical headline grabbing initiative, Fernandez has shown a crass misunderstanding of what Pope Francis represents, and the role expected of him by Catholics and non-believers alike.
As the international Catholic weekly The Tablet noted in its editorial, there is a paradox to Pope Francis being the centre of the world’s attention, the lead item on every news bulletin. In the Tablet’s words: “One of his chief tasks is to divert that attention away from himself as a personality and away from the Church as an institution, towards the gospel message and the person of Jesus Christ.He will do that by assuming the role of teacher,prophet and preacher. And as a truly global figure, he has to transcend his own race and nationality.”
Much as Mrs Fernandez would like this Jesuit to convert to the cause of the late Hugo Chavez, this is a priest I believe with sufficient independence of mind to know that in order to belong to everyone,he has , as the Tablet wisely recommends, to belong to everyone- not the exclusive domain of a Latin American populist ideology with a tendency towards authoritarianism and conflict.
In her attempt to define the parameters in which Francis should conduct himself, Fernandez has quoted the historical precedent of the Papal mediation over Argentina and Chile’s disputed sovereignty claim over the Beagle Channel.
The comparison barely stands up to close inspection. The mediation over the Beagle Channel by a non-Argentine Pope involved a willing negotiation by two Catholic countries under the auspices of a non-Argentine Pope. Any attempt by Pope Francis to mediate in the Falklands/Malvinas dispute would be rejected outright by Britain, on the grounds of the Pope’s nationality, and religious bias.
But the question is whether Pope Francis would allow himself to be used politically by the Fernandez government . I believe the answer must be no. For the goodwill that has grown up around the figure of Pope Francis has been largely largely thanks to a humility in style, practice, and word that is in striking contrast to the court of Mrs Fernandez, its confrontational politics, and bogus radicalism. When Mrs Fernandez reaches for her make-up, Francis washes feet.
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