Pope Francis isn’t more political
On Palm Sunday, which coincided with the 33rd World Youth Day, Pope Francis urged young people:
‘‘It is up to you not to keep quiet. Even if others keep quiet, if we older people and leaders, some corrupt, keep quiet, if the whole world keeps quiet and loses its joy, I ask you: Will you cry out?’’
The message was widely understood to speak to the March for Our Lives protests against gun violence in the United States. The pope then shook hands with thousands - and showed himself again to be a beloved world figure.
Why? Fascination with the current pope is often explained as a response to how differently he leads than did previous popes. Many commentators have argued that Francis is drastically changing the direction of the Catholic Church.
But does Francis really break as strongly with previous popes as the popular commentary suggests?
To examine that question, I closely analysed the pope’s written communications - encyclicals and tweets - to understand his papacy’s themes and positions. It’s true that Francis concentrates on modern and contentious topics, including inequality, climate change and immigration. But his more ‘‘political’’ statements are not systematically different from those of other popes; nor do they move away from the official church doctrine in critical ways.
My findings suggest that while this pope may attempt to break away from the Roman church’s past, the Vatican and its administrative apparatus, the Roman Curia, still heavily influence his communications - and in doing so, work to maintain continuity across papacies.
I explored the content of papal encyclicals, an official form of papal expression concerning the Catholic doctrine, and papal tweets.
In a first study, I was inspired by the popular belief that Francis’ famous climate change encyclical, ‘‘Laudato Si,’’ was a new type of political manifesto. I wanted to know whether it was truly more political than other popes’ encyclicals - or whether it fit the Vatican tradition of tackling problems in the secular world.
To answer this question, I collected the 34 papal encyclicals published during the tenure of the Second Vatican Council, from 1958 onward. I evaluated the language of these documents using computational textual methods. I used an ‘‘unsupervised topic model,’’ an algorithm that uses word correlations to cluster texts, then provides information about how to interpret the clusters.
This method allowed me to do two things. First, I could detect whether we can distinguish a consistent political tone in the encyclicals, distinct from the more theological message founded on spiritual concepts such as faith or the practice of praying. Second, I could examine whether only ‘‘Laudato Si’’ features political topics or whether they can be seen in other encyclicals.
In a second study, I explored Francis’ political interests on Twitter with a similar approach. I collected all the tweets from the account @Pontifex between 2013 and 2017. Once again using computational textual methods, I analysed the extent to which Francis’ tweets are political - and whether his more political tweets tend to follow the kind of events to which the church has traditionally responded, such as conflicts and violent attacks of social and religious minorities.
Pope Francis is behaving much as his predecessors did. As expected, I found that Francis is a politically engaged leader; his political views clearly mark his writings. He consistently dedicates space to contemporary social issues: On Twitter, roughly one of every eight tweets tend to reflect a political issue or a politically relevant event.
But his communications aren’t more political, or more often political, than other popes’ writings have been in the past. While Twitter may be new, Francis’ approach to this medium is not.
* Federica Genovese (@fgenovese86) is a lecturer at the University of Essex.