Farewell to a familiar news story angle? Argentina shows that pope's policy clout is fading

By Clemente Lisi
Get Religion
March 12, 2020

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/3/11/argentina-shows-that-popes-policy-clout-is-fading

Past popes have exerted an enormous amount of influence on politics around the world. A pope’s influential reach — and the large number of Catholics around the world — has often been vital in the shaping of laws and policy.

The best example is Saint Pope John Paul II. The Polish-born pontiff was instrumental in the fall of communism some three decades ago. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, had a different approach. Not a media star like JPII, Benedict focused his efforts on Africa. With help from humanitarian aid organizations, the Vatican exerted a great amount of influence in many African nations where the church matters. The church continues to grow there.

This has helped shape how journalists cover the papacy and, thus, the Catholicism. Shaping world politics? That’s news. Shaping doctrines and how people worship? That’s news— maybe. It depends. Do the doctrines have anything to do with gender or sex?

This brings us to Pope Francis.

A progressive star to some, Francis has made immigration and climate change the cornerstones of his foreign policy priorities. Although he is considered a man of great influence, his papacy has also coincided with the rise of both secularism and populism. That has given the Vatican strange bedfellows on some issues — like aligning itself with left-wing parties in Italy. His initiatives have been ineffective with others.

Francis’ papacy — aside from dividing Catholics, predominantly in the United States — has been a disappointment on a great many issues. While the pope’s position is within traditional Catholic teaching (on climate change and immigration), it has polarized many and been widely dismissed by the same populist governments that have also been appealing to doctrinally conservative-minded voters. Francis is not a forceful diplomat like John Paul II nor a prominent theologian like Benedict.

In terms of his strengths, Francis is seen as both humble and simple — traits that don’t get the job done when it comes to international diplomacy.

That Francis has essentially banked his entire legacy on combating climate change, while a noble endeavor, set a standard back in 2015 when he released his encyclical Laudato Si. The document is a plea to the world to “protect our common home.” Nonetheless, he isn’t the only one pushing the issue (replaced by a Swedish teen named Greta Thunberg), forcing Francis to instead divide Catholics who resist the policy changes that often comes with embracing the science of a warmer planet.

What Francis has failed to do is impact social change — many may say an inevitability in an ever-secular world — that has come into sharper view over the past decade. Examples include Ireland, which legalized abortion in 2018 and the pope’s native Argentina, which appears to be headed in the same direction.

A Buzzfeed story from last year — with the headline “How doctors and the church conspired to stop an 11-year-old girl from having an abortion after she was raped” — fueled pro-abortion advocates around the world. Argentine law currently allows for abortion in cases of rape or threat to the life of the mother. Pro-abortion advocates have complained that access is often limited even in those cases.

Argentina is a case study of the dwindling influence this pope has — even in his home country — when it comes to effectively influencing the outcome of an issue that the Catholic church has seen as important for decades.

Despite being a very Catholic country, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez recently announced his plan to introduce a bill in the lower house of Congress that would legalize, and expand, abortion across the country. If the bill passes, it would make it only the second democracy in Latin America to make abortion legal after Uruguay did so in 2012. The country’s previous president, Mauricio Macri, opposed it.

A recent Washington Post column by Mason Moseley, an assistant professor of political science at West Virginia University, argues that this once untouchable debate has become central in Argentine politics: “The genesis of the current abortion debate in Argentina lies in an emerging feminist social movement called Ni Una Menos (“Not one (woman) less”), which sprang up in 2015 in response to gender violence. Ni Una Menos began after several grisly murders of young women. Launched with a hashtag, an education campaign, and a mass protest, the movement has been demanding the government take measures to reduce machista violence. And it had widespread support among Argentine citizens.”

She added that these forces have become emboldened because Ni Una Menos “provided the organizational network necessary to mobilize women for abortion rights in massive demonstrations when it absorbed reproductive rights into its core set of claims. Through framing abortion decriminalization as an issue of social justice, and presenting evidence that clandestine abortions represent a leading cause of maternal mortality, abortion rights advocates persuaded many Argentine citizens to take up the cause. Feminist activists claimed that abortion must be legal to truly achieve ‘ni una menos.’ Only days after one of their largest rallies in February 2018, the conservative Macri announced he supported a “responsible and mature” debate about abortion.”

While the Vatican has gotten involved in Italian politics (primarily to combat the outspoken populist right-wing star Matteo Salvini), the pope has been a virtual non-factor in Argentina’s heated abortion debate.