BONO, THE ROCK STAR of the Irish band U2, is known for storytelling in his lyrics. Through his charities, he works with the Catholic Church and others to reduce global poverty and debt. He also offers a recurring critique of the Church: you folks do good work, yet you’re terrible at telling your story.
He’s
right, and Victor Gaetan’s book, God’s Diplomats: Pope Francis, Vatican
Diplomacy, and America’s Armageddon, explains why: Vatican diplomats commit to
humility and discretion. Being humble about the work, not bragging about
successes, is not just pious religious claptrap, it’s a shrewd operating
principle. In zones of war and poverty, people’s agency has been ripped from
them. Restoring peace and rebuilding communities depend on restoring agency and
respect. Establishing the right relationships, with processes driven by the
local actors, builds a more just and sustainable peace over the long haul. Pope
Francis and Catholic peacebuilders can get a lot done if they do not “claim the
credit.”
Gaetan’s
book tells the story that Pope Francis and Holy See diplomats themselves do not
in a combination of accessible, novel-like prose and meticulous research
(including 117 pages of endnotes). The award-winning journalist has reported on
Vatican diplomacy for over 20 years, and in God’s Diplomats he tells all. The
book reads at points like a thriller, whether the author is recounting Pope
Francis’s foray into an active war zone in the Central African Republic or the
visit of Archbishop Caccia, a seasoned diplomat of the Holy See, to pay
respects to wounded Muslim victims of Daesh (ISIS) terrorist attacks in
Lebanon.
Most
books on this topic are written by “the other team” — former government
officials who have represented the United States as ambassadors to the Holy
See. No matter the administration or political party they represent, their
memoirs follow a common arc: claim the successes, explain away the losses,
sometimes settle scores, and often paint the Holy See and the Catholic Church
somewhat less favorably than the sharp US government official, who is, after
all, the hero of the story. From this US government’s point of view, the Church
talking with “rogue states,” like North Korea and Iran, is naïve or misguided.
But as the world’s oldest diplomatic corps, with over 2,000 years of experience
as a global network, the Vatican and its officials prefer a different approach.
They engage with everyone, on all sides, and do not write memoirs.
Pope
Francis represents both one of the world’s largest religions and its smallest
sovereign state, with 1.3 billion Catholics spread across 193 countries as well
as the 49-hectare territory of Vatican City State itself. The Holy See has no
army or military might. Its budget comes largely from tourist revenue. Yet without
guns and money, Holy See diplomats achieve successes against great odds, and
sometimes bucking against the world’s superpower, the United States. Why?
Gaetan
takes us through Vatican Diplomacy 101 in part one, explaining how diplomats
are educated and how they operate. Vatican diplomats are pastors first, trained
in listening and engaging with even the worst sinners and sworn to secrecy in
the confessional. This gives them some useful skills for negotiating, as when
Pope Francis helped to improve US relations with Cuba.
The book
provides a great service in documenting how the Church has moved away from just
war tradition to just peace: “Avoid creating winners and losers. Remain
impartial in the face of conflict. Refrain from partisan politics. Pursue
dialogue with everyone.” With Catholics living on all sides of conflicts, the
Church does not seek short-term “winner takes all” solutions, but takes the
long view, seeking common ground and practical, sustainable peace. That’s how
Pope John XXIII was able to help de-escalate and defuse the Cuban Missile
Crisis between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the closest the United States and the
USSR ever came to nuclear war. The rule to walk the talk, showing faith through
charity, is key to understanding how Church diplomats build trust and
relationships around the world. For example, by providing medical assistance in
North Korea and assistance to earthquake victims in Iran, the Church engages
with what the US considers “pariah” regimes in order to assist the suffering people
who happen to live under those inhospitable governments. The Catholic Church is
the world’s largest non-governmental provider of education and health care; its
charities operate around the world. What the diplomatic corps lacks in size it
makes up for in flexibility, integrating and working alongside the vast
networks of local churches, charities, religious orders, and missionaries.
This is
how the Church operationalizes the rule to “incarnate diplomacy through a
culture of encounter.” Taking the long view gives Vatican diplomats the freedom
to “start processes (that God can finish)”: “Initiate encounters with humility
and respect. Proceed through concrete steps and gestures. Allow mutual respect
to grow step by step. Find common ground and build agreement from that point.”
In
Argentina, Pope Francis had priests literally tend to sheep, using ancient
monastic practices of self-sufficiency and farm work to ensure humility so that
priests did not become “little princes,” but instead understood the toils of
the people they served.
In part
two, Gaetan shows how these rules are implemented in war zones from Ukraine to
Kenya, the Middle East, South Sudan, and Colombia. A downside of this
geographic approach is that it misses some of Pope Francis and the Holy See’s
most effective diplomacy on cross-cutting global issues, from combating climate
change, environmental degradation, and human trafficking, to advancing
humanitarian arms control, including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons.
The book
is at its most compelling in describing the heroic work of local Church actors
to build peace in Colombia’s decades-old civil conflict. When one Catholic
human rights defender, Alma Rosa Jaramillo, was brutally murdered by violent
paramilitary mercenaries and her body dismembered as a warning to deter others,
it had the opposite effect. Another woman immediately volunteered to take her
place, demonstrating the resilience of religious peacebuilding.
God’s
Diplomats delivers on the first two parts of its subtitle, describing the
Vatican diplomacy and the particular attributes Pope Francis brings to it. As a
journalist, Gaetan also criticizes Church efforts, detailing failures in Kenya
when the Church itself split along ethnic lines. He also paints disgraced former
cardinal Theodore McCarrick (not a member of the diplomatic corps) as “an
albatross,” a self-promoting global ambulance chaser, seeking to insert himself
artificially into international crises.
Some of
the book’s biggest bombshells come in addressing the last part of the subtitle
(“America’s Armageddon”), about the conflicts between a war-making United
States and a peace-building Vatican. Gaetan asks, for example: where did the
well-coordinated smear campaign against Pope Francis come from? He traces the
source of the false stories (for instance, those claiming that the young Jorge
Bergoglio was cozy with the Argentine military regime during Argentina’s Dirty
War) to Horacio Verbitsky, a double agent paid by the CIA, and who was himself
a supporter of the Argentine military regime. Within one hour of Pope Francis’s
election, Verbitsky’s “big lie” was in the headlines.
Gaetan
also questions why Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Asia, was targeted
for the atomic bomb in 1945. The city was not on the original target list, but
added to the list at the last minute, without President Truman’s knowledge or
consent. Few in the United States realize this, but Gaetan is on solid
historical ground here. However, he then conjectures beyond the historical evidence,
wondering why the Catholic Church in Nagasaki was hit during the atomic attack
despite not being a military target. Was that not, he speculates, a form of
payback for the Church establishing diplomatic relations with Japan in 1941,
against US objections? In a volume filled with citations, he does not cite any
source here.
Gaetan
is on firmer ground in describing Pope John Paul II’s unsuccessful efforts to
urge President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq. Pope John Paul II warned that
a US invasion would destabilize the region, incite extremists, and generate
even worse violence, which would harm civilians and lead to the decimation of
ancient Christian communities in the lands where Christianity first began.
President Bush rebuffed him, and, tragically, all those warnings came true.
Pope
Francis and Vatican diplomacy are not always successful. But, as Gaetan
reports, they are not deterred. God works on long timelines.
***Dr.
Maryann Cusimano Love is a tenured associate professor of Politics at The
Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She is the author of over 13
books, including Global Issues (2020), I Am Kamala Harris (2021), and You Are
My I Love You (2001). She serves on the Advisory Board of the Catholic
Peacebuilding Network, on Pope Francis Security Task Force, on the board of the
Arms Control Association, and as a lay consultant to the US Conference of
Catholic Bishops International Justice and Peace Committee.