Conclave | Not the military chaplain of the West

"For far too long, I have had to live with people who hate peace," reads a chapter in Francis's autobiography ("Hope," 2025). War, he writes, only piles injustice upon injustice. "And even today, the arms race, the expansion of one's own spheres of influence, and aggressive, violent politics do not create any stability. Never."

On the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, Francis described the current state of the world as a world war in installments. This, too, is Vatican: Shortly thereafter, this pointed statement was replaced by a more inoffensive formulation on the official website, which didn't stop Francis from repeating it again and again at the next opportunity.

His efforts to end the war in Ukraine through diplomacy met with criticism from Western governments. But the Pope, he explained to an Italian newspaper, is not the military chaplain of the West.

Francis condemned the double standard: "Wars, assassinations, persecutions motivated by racism or religion, and so many acts of violence against human dignity are punished in different ways, depending on whether they are more or less favorable to certain, essentially economic, interests. Something is true as long as it is acceptable to a powerful person, and it ceases to be so when it loses its usefulness to him."

When the world was on the brink of nuclear war in the early 1960s, Pope John XXII addressed himself "to all people of good will" with his encyclical Pacem in Terris. In the face of the social and ecological crisis, Francis took the same dramatic step with his encyclicals Laudato Si ("On Care for Our Common Home") and Fratelli Tutti ("On Fraternity and Social Friendship").

"When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, it has serious consequences for society. The logic that prioritizes the strongest has led to immense inequality, injustice, and violence, affecting the majority of humanity because resources then become the property of those who arrive first or who are most powerful—the winner takes all."

Everything in the world is connected to everything else, according to the guiding principle of the two encyclicals, and thus there is a close relationship between global poverty and the fragility of the planet. Francis's holistic ecology incorporates a social perspective that considers the rights of those who are neglected. Subordinating private property to the general purpose of goods and the general right to their use is thus the "fundamental principle of the entire social-ethical order."

When denounced as "communist" for such statements, Francis countered that the critics probably did not understand that the poor are at the center of the Gospel.

It was the Pope himself who, in a private audience in 2014, encouraged Alexis Tsipras, Franz Kronreif, and me to open a Marxist-Christian dialogue on a transversal social ethic. This provided the impetus for the founding of the European Dialogue Platform for Dialogue between Socialists and Christians.

Ten years later, we visited him again with a delegation from Dialop. Despite his illness, the Pope, in good spirits, once again emphasized the need for dialogue that breaks with established patterns. Above all, this must concern the less fortunate, the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, migrants, the exploited, and all those treated as waste by a throwaway society.

Pope Francis did not give himself the appearance of infallibility. The existing Church, too, imposed limits on him. Whether the next pope is a traditionalist, a reformer, or a compromise candidate, much of what Francis said and did points beyond these limits—toward the utopia of a Church that places the poor at its center and works together with all people of good will to protect our shared world. It will endure.