Pope Francis: the new King of Italy

Much has been written recently about how Pope Francis has become a new pin-up for progressives, anti-capitalists and those who feel that the US president, Barack Obama, has disappointed the poor and downtrodden. It’s an interesting turn of events for the papacy, a hierarchical institution that normally makes the headlines for the wrong reasons: paedophilia, clerical cover-ups and its unfashionable stance on women and homosexuality.

The ‘Austerity Pope’, who shuns the traditional opulence of the role, has certainly tapped into today’s spirit of banker-bashing, non-judgementalism and inclusion (even if many Catholics rather like a pope that pontificates), but another more curious development is afoot. This is that Francis has, in all but name, become Italy‘s new monarch. In a country where politicians are abhorred like nowhere else in Europe, he is the figure most Italians look up to for guidance, inspiration and leadership.

Pope Francis made the first state visit of his pontificate last month. He travelled two miles to Italy’s presidential palace, where he told President Giorgio Napolitano of his solidarity with Italy and the challenges it faces on immigration, poverty and hard-up families. Francis also recalled his visit to Lampedusa, the island off which more than 300 Eritrean refugees drowned in October.

The Pope’s intervention after that disaster – ‘Where there is no work, there is no dignity’, he said, in one of his many critiques of global capitalism, telling those assembled how his Italian parents also struggled when they sought to create a new life in Argentina.

He has since intervened in the scandal of toxic-waste dumping outside Naples, one of many Mafia rackets in the south of the country. Last month he telephoned a nun, one of 150,000 people who had sent him postcards showing local children who had died of cancer because of the waste. This was just the latest, headline-grabbing phone-call – in which he invites recipients to address him in the familiar ‘you’ form – to have endeared him to many.

President Neopolitano is indeed widely respected, but mostly as a dependable elder statesman. He is the longest-serving president in the history of the Italian Republic, and the Italian press often refer to him as ‘King George’ as a consequence. But Neopolitano has only been head of state since 2006, and the esteem in which he is held is proportional to the contempt in which Italians hold their parliamentary politicians.

Italian politics is mired in another crisis. Anti-political feeling is rife, even by Italian standards, as epitomised by the popular vote this year for Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. Grillo is a former comedian and his party is perhaps the most apolitical and amorphous of all Europe’s populist parties today.

Last week, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was finally ejected from parliament. The Italians had tolerated Berlusconi for 20 years, largely because he offered a degree of stability. The collapse of the First Republic in 1992 had revealed a profound level of corruption and Mafia-collusion in Italian politics, so entrenched, it seemed, that despite all that was wrong and embarrassing about Berlusconi, he was a devil better than the deep blue sea.

Berlusconi may have gone but the mood remains cynical. As the people’s pontiff’.

Patrick West is a columnist for spiked. He is the author of several books including Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004). Read his blog here.