Israeli Member of Knesset on Pope Francis

Read the article on the Haaretz site here

Will Pope Francis turn the Catholic Church into a movement for social justice?

It’s amazing, but a Jesuit priest of all people is the world's most fluent and passionate speaker on the connection between poverty and environmental and distributive injustice.

In order to join the most popular flight in the world you have to board an Alitalia plane. A completely ordinary plane. There’s no bar or even a double bed. Anyone who fantasizes about being pampered in the sky had better remain on the ground. The flight is fascinating thanks to one Argentine passenger: Jorge Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis.

Catholics don’t have to multiply like rabbits, he said on a flight from Manila when there was discussion of birth control. We’ve turned the world into a big garbage can, he asserted on a flight to Seoul. “And who am I to judge him?” he wondered on a flight from Brazil, in reference to a gay priest. The Vatican correspondents remained open-mouthed. In the past when these were the most explosive subjects in the Church, more moderate statements than those would have led to bloodshed.

Besides the sensational content, it’s the discussion itself. Many of those correspondents have been attached to popes for years and have never been able to pose them a question: an inconceivable situation for White House correspondents or Israeli political correspondents. As a result, readers and viewers never heard any direct, human speech from the leaders of over a billion faithful.

The plane takes off early in the morning. The atmosphere is relaxed. Soccer and Islam. Abortions and global warming. The man is interested in everything. Quotes are fired like bolts of lightning. He has even penetrated the sealed cover of the self-obsessed Israeli public arena.

Make no mistake. He is a conservative cleric: opposed to abortions, same-sex marriage or euthanasia. But he opens doors, in the knowledge that what enters through them is liable to be contrary to the oppressive dogmas that his predecessors defended tooth and nail.

So what does he want? To be relevant. He understands, as do an increasing number of American politicians, that the old war horse of “family values” has been defeated by the zeitgeist. He achieves relevance by supporting socio-environmental progress. That is the message of the first South American pope.

It’s not the rich who should rule the world, he declared. Jesus already spoke about it. But Francis doesn’t make do with religious-style charity, which throws crumbs to the poor and only perpetuates the distress. He seems to have an organized concept of social justice. That’s a tremendous difference.

Of course one can ask whether a religious establishment can possibly promote social justice, because there’s an internal contradiction here. But for now it’s having an effect.

Because actually there is no world leader today who is a spokesperson for this great message. Obama, Merkel, Putin, Xi Jinping and David Cameron are all lobbyists for big capital and the major polluters. Sometimes they themselves are the problem. It’s amazing, but a Jesuit priest of all people is today the most fluent and passionate speaker in the world on the issue of the connection between poverty and environmental and distributive injustice. His first step - his choice of a name - was already revolutionary. He is the first pope to choose the name of Francis of Assisi, who devoted his life to the battle against poverty and to love of nature.

Pope Francis just returned from his home continent. Although no fan of the liberation theology of South America’s left-wing priests, he snipes at neo-liberalism and global financial institutions. Natural resources belong to everyone, he declared in Ecuador, as if he were at an Israeli gas demonstration. And between one selfie and the next he has a new proposal: Anyone who boasts of wealth that causes deprivation should pay a “social mortgage.”

If he continues thus he is likely to effect a historic change in the Church, and perhaps in religion’s social role: Will he change it from a conservative means of policing, which sanctifies the existing order for the sake of the few who benefit from it, into a movement that promotes principles of vested interests. It will be interesting to see how far he can go.