Pope Francis, as the leader of a worldwide faith community of more than 1.4 billion people, naturally had a significant impact on international affairs.
The pope’s consistent, compassionate attention to migration was well known from the earliest days of his pontificate. Indeed, his first public act outside of Rome in July 2013 was to celebrate Mass on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa among Middle Eastern and African migrants who had found refuge there, bringing attention to what would prove a chronic worldwide migration crisis.
His efforts to promote integral development and ecology were also clear from the beginning. An early encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” published in 2015, offered a vision of a global economic order that placed care for creation and the human person at the forefront.
But the pope was also attentive to a number of other global issues and challenges, some prominent in the public imagination, like peacemaking and nuclear disarmament. The pope played a pivotal role beginning in 2014 in an international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. Much as he extended church teaching on the use of the death penalty, which he described as “inadmissible” in 2018, he declared nuclear deterrence, the long-accepted strategy of a nuclear weapons balance of terror, morally bankrupt.
Other global issues of concern to Francis were more obscure, like tax fairness, his support for “tierra, techo y trabajo” (land, lodging and labor) efforts, just and sustainable development, the equitable distribution of global wealth and his growing anxiety over the rise of autonomous (A.I.) weapons systems.
Francis often deplored a “globalization of indifference,” which detaches the world’s affluent from the suffering of its poorest and most vulnerable people. He condemned a global economy that kills and called for an economy that lifts up. He often addressed, as he did in “Laudato Si’,” the idea of intergenerational solidarity.
To many, Francis seemed one of the last credible moral voices able to speak with clarity and authority on a gamut of global challenges and concerns. Who can now take his place and continue to hold up the plight of migrating people and care for creation, the challenge of addressing global inequities? Who will be a trusted voice for peace?
Distribution of wealth and obligations
Eric LeCompte is the executive director of Jubilee USA Network, a global debt relief advocacy group. The pope’s predecessors, St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he said, shared many of his views “regarding inequality, tax and debt and how those issues impact the poor.” But Pope Francis was able to shine a light on these issues as few world leaders have been able to, he said.
What distinguished Francis was his poignant, personal experience with the issues of poverty and debt justice. As a younger man, Francis witnessed the powerful effects of financial and debt crises on the most vulnerable in Argentina during his years as a Jesuit priest and later as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Pope Francis, Mr. LeCompte said, “saw directly how the impacts of unfair financial policies make poverty worse and create more difficult global challenges.”
Pope Francis unabashedly talked about the injustice of tax evasion, tax fraud and tax avoidance, acts which in the end mean that in a world of wealth and abundance, “we don’t have the resources to deal with poverty.”
Mr. LeCompte recalled that the first set of credentials for new ambassadors Francis accepted as his pontificate began included those from three nations that have acted as tax havens for the wealthy. The pope did not miss the opportunity to lift up the moral component of such avoidance structures and the practical social and humanitarian problems they contribute to, pointing out that hiding wealth from taxation “takes investment directly away from the poor.”
The pope’s emphasis on accepting tax obligations and tax equity “really goes back to very early church teaching,” Mr. LeCompte said, “these ideas that if we take more than what is enough, we’ve taken it from people who don’t have enough.” The pope frequently spoke about distributive economics, “which is part of what tax is.”
Among the pope’s final acts was the declaration of 2025 as a Jubilee Year that would include a focus on addressing the immiserating debt burden of poor nations as a new global debt crisis looms. Pope Francis flipped the script in talking about how to address climate change and poverty and how to finance economic development, according to Mr. LeCompte.
The pope consistently pointed out, he said, that in historical terms the earth’s riches have been extracted from the world’s vulnerable peoples and delivered to the affluent West, while powerless states imported poverty, ecological ruin and debt. Addressing those historic inequities through a practical, persisting debt jubilee process, the pope insisted, would be a measure of justice, not an act of charity.
“I like to tell people the most important speech that Pope Francis ever gave is the speech that no one understood, and that was his 2015 speech to the United Nations,” Mr. LeCompte remembers. “If you look at the press coverage, people say [of the speech]: ‘Oh, he talked about climate change.’ ‘No, he talked about war.’ ‘No, he talked about human rights.’”
But Pope Francis talked about those issues, Mr. LeCompte said, as part of an interconnected complex that can be traced back to global economic inequities, part of the reason he has “so forcefully made this Jubilee Year a focus on debt relief.”
The pope, he said, endorsed “permanent and continuous processes to deal with the challenges of debt and financial inequities,” arguing that “only if we deal with those things are we going to have the tools and resources to deal with poverty, to deal with climate change, to deal with human rights, to deal with the scourge of war.”
Francis’ fight against war
The pope also returned the church’s focus to nuclear disarmament and peacemaking, frequently decrying the global arms trade and urging the end of conflict and a return to dialogue in the Middle East, South Sudan and Ukraine. The Vatican under Francis turned a spotlight on what had been the arcane issue of autonomous weapons systems, which holds the potential to allow missile and drone targeting conducted by artificial intelligence without the intervention of human decision-makers, “progress” now coming closer than ever to actual battlefield reality in Ukraine and Gaza.
“Pope Francis said the dramatic things that had to be said about nuclear weapons,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law and international peace studies at the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, recalled. The church has, since “Pacem in Terris” in 1963, condemned the use of nuclear weapons as inherently immoral owing to their indiscriminate and potentially earth-ending destructive power. But in an address in Hiroshima in November 2019, Pope Francis declared the mere possession of nuclear weapons itself also morally indefensible.
“How can we propose peace if we constantly invoke the threat of nuclear war as a legitimate recourse for the resolution of conflicts?” he asked. “May the abyss of pain endured here remind us of boundaries that must never be crossed. A true peace can only be an unarmed peace.”
“Previously, the church had the position that nuclear deterrence essentially could be allowed as long as countries were working toward disarmament,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, a policy coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recalled. “But Pope Francis really saw the state of the world as it was and recognized that deterrence is inherently destabilizing,” she said, “that as long as nuclear weapons exist, the countries that possess them are investing billions of dollars into weapons of mass destruction instead of taking care of their people.”
The pope perceived, she added, that despite significant progress over decades in reducing nuclear stockpiles, the thousands of destructive weapons that remained were “an incredibly destabilizing force in the world”—not the guarantors of peace they were purported to be.
“He made it very clear that deterrence is wrong-headed,” Dr. O’Connell remembered, because it ran the risk of accidental detonations or unintentionally triggering a nuclear exchange and relied on untested theories about human behavior, the “mutually assured destruction” gambit, that could end in mass suffering and destruction.
“It took someone from the Global South who didn’t live in a country with nuclear weapons to say to everyone else that the emperor has no clothes. ‘You’ve built this incredibly expensive, problematic construct on a myth, on an empirical fallacy, and it’s got to end.’”
That “shift” declaring deterrence immoral “was really fundamental and pivotal in our work toward achieving a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons,” Ms. Sanders-Zakre said. “The Holy See at the U.N. became really a leading player in supporting the negotiation and conclusion of the treaty around the prohibition of nuclear weapons, and now we see support among Catholic communities and [other] religious communities for nuclear abolition” as “an important part of our movement.”
The Vatican, in fact, was among the first U.N. members to sign and ratify the nuclear weapons abolition treaty in September 2017.
The landmark treaty Francis endorsed has entered into force with the support of about half the world’s nations, even as nuclear powers like the United States, Russia and China remain holdouts. The treaty has entered “its operational phase,” Ms. Sanders-Zakre said.
“We’re working to get even more countries to join the treaty so it becomes fully universalized, and ensuring that all countries are fully implementing the treaty. But in a quite bleak landscape for nuclear disarmament, it’s really one of the few pillars of light, of countries working together to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
Now it’s ‘up to us’
Unlike a growing political chorus in the United States, Pope Francis continued to have confidence in multilateral institutions and the international rule of law to address significant economic, social and geopolitical challenges like climate change and conflict resolution.
“What I cherish so much about Pope Francis is how he approached the world [in] this holistic way,” Dr. O’Connell said. The pope perceived how global problems “cause so much pain locally. He saw them all intertwined, and he never lost the energy to work for them, and he never lost the joy in following his vocation to work for them.”
Dr. O’Connell recalled an encounter with the pope in the dining hall of his Vatican residence, the Santa Marta guesthouse, where she watched him sit down to a meal and then return to his work, impressed by the energy he clearly retained despite his age.
“I think how much harder it was for Pope Francis,” criticized from all sides but who still “kept going.”
As a contemporary academic, Dr. O’Connell has similarly come to feel “under attack from all sides.” “Those of us who work on international law, who work for human rights, for peace, for care of our common home, for migrants,” she said, are under threat from the Trump administration, as is “our invaluable research into life-saving medicine, science, the arts and literature that nurtures us and keeps us going.”
“It’s happened before in history,” she said. Now, “we need to see if we can rise to the occasion and respond in a way that we move to a better place.”
“We are here on the university campuses, and Pope Francis was there in Argentina during the junta,” she said. “He knows he made mistakes, [but] he never stopped trying during that time to do better and to take what he learned forward. So I’m looking to his legacy and hoping he intercedes for us.”
Now, “it’s up to us,” she said. “We don’t have him with us; we have to pick it up here and use everything…all the inspiration, all the teaching that he gave us.”
More from America
- Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on Pope Francis, Trump, jubilee and debt forgiveness
- Pope Francis wants you to remember the three T’s: Tierra, Techo, Trabajo (Land, Lodging, Labor)
- Nuclear disarmament now a ‘moral imperative’ as Pope Francis rejects deterrence
- No More Nukes?: A new movement argues it is time to finally ban the bomb.
- Pope Francis warns us: Covid-19 is not the only global crisis we’re facing right now
A deeper dive
- ICAN tribute to Pope Francis
- Talking Tax Justice at the Vatican
- Tax Justice Network: Remembering Pope Francis
- USCCB: Nuclear Weapons resources
- USCCB: Autonomous Weapons: Landmines and Drones
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
