A recent article in Foreign Affairs, The Pope as Diplomat, reviewed Pope Benedict XVI's tenure through a diplomatic lens. It discusses that during his time as Pope, Benedict established full diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Malasia, Montenegro South Sudan, Russia, and Botswana. He appointed the first Vatican envoy to Vietnam, a step towards full diplomatic relations. One of his goals was to engage in better Catholic Muslim Dialoge. As part of this he moved towards a "genuine encounter" with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who personally visited the Vatican. While Saudi Arabia is not open to full diplomatic relations with the Vatican and still does not allow Catholic churches, last year King Abdullah formed a foundation to improve inter-religious understanding.
What does this have to do with Public Diplomacy? Pope Benedict's formal background was that of a scholar, not a political statesman like several of his predecessors. As the article points out, this lead to his having a different approach to foreign affairs, and at times lead to political missteps and misunderstandings. Despite snaffles, Pope Benedict found a way to open relations with other countries and areas. Through this action he served as the center in what Ali Fisher discussed in his article Looking at the Man in the Mirror as the hub or star of a leadership network. In this model, the metaphor of a wheel is used to convey the idea of a core "hub" person or people that connect one group of people to another. It is not a hierarchical structure, rather the hub is just an access point that must be opened in order for communication to be better enabled. Often when people, myself included, think of the Catholic Church hierarchy is one of the first things that comes to mind. This is a bit different, though. Using the Pope as a way to open up diplomatic relations is a way to open up a massive group of people, such as Catholics, to issues that the Pope has decided to pursue. In this case more envolved Muslim-Christian dialogue .
Great post, Tiffany. It will be interesting to see the new role Pope Francis will play as a “diplomat”. His election raises numerous questions. As an Argentine, will he represent more of Latin America’s interests? If we follow Fisher’s logic and believe the Pope to serve as “the hub or star of a leadership network”, could this mean that we are seeing the hub of the network shift towards emerging regions like Latin America, Asia and Africa? Moreover, how will that affect the social power of the Catholic Church, especially in countries that aren’t predominantly Catholic, such as Argentina? We’ll be paying close attention to the direction in which he takes the Catholic Church.
ReplyDelete(This article touches on the Pope’s history in Argentina and presents the perspective of an Argentine: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/opinion/god-is-an-argentine.html?_r=1& )