In 2016, I was working with a team in the Vatican to put Pope Francis on Instagram. I made the case that simplicity was key and that we should therefore provide captions in just three languages: Italian, English and Spanish. I lost the argument, and @franciscus debuted in nine languages. But English, Spanish and Italian led the list.
With the election of Pope Leo — someone who not only speaks those three languages fluently but knows well the cultures behind them — I feel like I’ve won. They’re the three most important languages in the Roman Catholic Church today. Because language reflects culture, Leo’s linguistic gifts could help him make a mark on the governance of the church both globally and in the Vatican.
Leo was born in the middle of America and attended school on the South Side of Chicago, but his two decades as a missionary and bishop in Peru and a church official in Rome allowed him to embrace both Italian and Hispanic cultures as well. You can view the new pope as either not very American, or the very best that America has to offer — someone who made a sacrifice as a missionary to serve in a country much poorer than his own, embracing the culture and loving his new neighbors.
Leo is the first native English speaker to ascend the throne of Peter in nearly 900 years, after Adrian IV in the 12th century. Unlike during the Middle Ages, he does it at a time when Anglophone culture dominates global communications, finance, technology and the arts. English is the new Latin, the language of the Empire of the Internet.
Italian to my ears is the most beautiful of the new pope’s languages, and knowing it helps so much in understanding — and loving — Italy. But it can also be confusing. Leave it to Italian politicians to give us the concept of “convergenze parallele,” or “parallel convergences,” to describe how opposing political parties can accommodate each other’s position.
Though only a tiny percentage of Catholics speak Italian, it’s the language of the Vatican and necessary for the pontiff to communicate with his collaborators. Italian is also essential in understanding how things work (and often don’t) in the Roman Curia, or Vatican bureaucracy.
With family roots in Italy, Pope Francis spoke Italian well, and it helped him from the start of his pontificate. Francis, an Argentine who became bishop of Rome, won over the faithful both in the Eternal City, and all of Italy, by greeting them with the very simple “buona sera!” the evening he was elected. Most Sundays he would end his noonday prayer in St. Peter’s Square with, “buon pranzo,” or “have a good lunch.”
Spanish, albeit with an Argentine accent, gave Francis direct access to more than a third of the Catholic world, as it will to Leo. There’s nothing like being able to speak as a native to people in their own language, and this showed in the trips Francis took to Latin America, where he was greeted as one of their own. Francis had to confront huge problems in Latin America as well, most notably a sex abuse crisis in Chile, but at least he could do it in his mother tongue.
The sex abuse crisis in the church was a perfect example of the cultural gaps among senior Vatican officials. While the crisis emerged in the United States and soon became a global issue, one Colombian cardinal suggested in 2002 that since there were so many English-speaking journalists asking questions about it, abuse must be an Anglo-American problem. An influential Italian cardinal dismissed the Vatican’s handling of abuse accusations as “petty gossip” as late as 2010.
Like anyone, and any pope, Leo will have his shortcomings, but being weak on abuse is not likely to be one of them. As an American, he surely understands that it has been the greatest crisis to hit the church in the New World.
Pope Leo likes Wordle. People who play it like words, and they probably try to be precise when they’re speaking. That will serve a pope well. But language is a lot bigger than word choice. It’s also about how you think.
While Leo’s language skills and the mentality that comes with them will have its advantages, being an American may prompt some resistance in a Roman Curia in which Italians always have the home court advantage. There may not have been an Italian pope in nearly 50 years, but the Vatican is surrounded by Italy, Italians still run it at most levels and many believe it should stay that way.
A can-do Anglo mind-set could help Pope Leo confront the problems he’ll have to face, starting in Rome. Francis tried hard to clean up Vatican finances, but the outspoken Australian cardinal he brought in to do the job, George Pell, didn’t do diplomacy well, and clashed with other powerful cardinals, limiting his impact. Leo’s multicultural experiences might help him avoid the same pitfalls.
Pope Francis also tried to reform a sprawling Vatican communications department, but he was unwilling to fire people, and it remains a huge drain on the budget. Pope Leo may not want to fire anyone, either. But I suspect he might ask why, in the age of the internet, the Vatican spends millions of dollars every year publishing an afternoon newspaper in Italian — the 164-year-old Osservatore Romano — whose readers could fit comfortably in a slice of St. Peter’s Square.
Alleged mismanagement of properties, a budget deficit and an imbalance in the pension fund are among the matters Pope Leo will have to deal with in the Vatican. Being comfortable in English and Spanish and Italian won’t solve those problems, but it will allow Leo to have some frank conversations with the people who need to fix them, with nothing lost in translation.
Greg Burke, who was a spokesman for Pope Francis, teaches communications at IESE Business School in Barcelona. He was a Rome correspondent for Time and Fox News.
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