Pope Francis makes important decisions and takes on strong stands, expediently. He meets everybody, and speaks to everyone. Then he makes up his mind, often – as recounted by his first ‘first secretary’, Monsignor Alfred Xuereb – after having prayed. Pope Francis takes his decisions the way Jesuits give their responses. i.e., in a short, straightforward way, leaving to the others the opportunity to personally develop the response.

Hence, the establishment of Pontifical commissions of reference on the Institute for Religious Works (the so called Vatican bank) and on the governing of the Vatican. The commissions had a limited mandate (they gave their final report to the Pope on May 22) and had been established with the idea of counseling the Pope. Likewise, the Secretariat for the Economy, the new Council for the Economy, as well as the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors: all of these bodies have been established without statutes, which are left to the internal discussion of the members within the new bodies. Similarly, the “complaint office” for ‘delicta graviora’ within the disciplinary branch of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: the office does not have a stated mandate yet, but the chairman has been already appointed in the person of bishop José Luis Mollaghan of Rosario (Argentina), whom Pope Francis transferred from a dioceses which did not particularly loved him. And also similarly, the Council of Eight Cardinals, whose establishment was legitimated by a chirograph only at the eve of their first meeting.

Those who see behind these decisions a defined program of action probably do not take into account that Pope Francis himself, in an interview he granted to the Italian prominent newspaper “Corriere della Sera”, underscored that he «did not have a specific plan for the Church,» and the he just «followed the indications of the General Congregations,» i.e. the pre-Conclave meetings of Cardinals.

Pope Francis has in the end one only true goal: that the Church be missionary. In order to have a missionary Church, Pope Francis wants a credible Church. Not only must the Church not be too “mundane” (bound to earthly preoccupations), it should not seem mundane. The Church should not be confined by earthly tasks and linked to struggles for power.

Hence, a series of other Papal choices. For instance, the first Pope Francis’ consistory surprised everyone for the promotion of archbishops (and, in the Haiti case, of a bishop) hailing from a peripheral and unimportant dioceses, while on the other hand Pope Francis did not give the red hat to archbishops in charge of dioceses who have always received them and become cardinals because of tradition and influence. This was how the Pope wanted to show that there are no first and second class dioceses, and that bishops in all dioceses may become cardinals, if they dedicate their lives to serve.

Even the reshuffles among members of the congregations, which led to a list of “promoted” and “dismissed” drafted by media outlets, should be read with a broader view. Simply, Pope Francis did not want power to be concentrated in the hands of very few people, and wanted to show that everyone can be equal.

A victim of this view was Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. In the reshuffles of the members of the Congregation, Cardinal Bagnasco had been relieved of being a member of the Congregation for Bishops and replaced by his vice-president at the Italian Bishops’ Conference, the Archbishop of Perugia Gualtiero Bassetti, whom the Pope later created cardinal. Cardinal Bagnasco had been confirmed as a member of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, but only until his mandate expires.

These choices were interpreted as a clear Pope Francis repudiation of Cardinal Bagnasco and his way of managing the Italian Bishops’ Conference. Pope Francis’ speech last Monday indicated this was not so. The Pope had not gone to the Italian Bishops’ Conference to impose his personal views. He was giving the inaugural speech by invitation of the very same Cardinal Bagnasco, to back once more a missionary turn.

The Italian bishops discussed and decided that they still want the Pope to choose their president. On the other hand, they paved the way for more collegiality, thus outlining the reform of their statutes: they will vote to elect three candidates, and the Pope will be able to choose among the three chosen. It was said the Pope was deeply disappointed, since it was not exactly what he expected and wanted from the bishops. In fact, the Pope just wanted to promote a wider discussion, in order to reach more collegiality. He is not interested in how the election will be handled. He wanted the bishops to show their unity.

Looking back at Pope Francis’ decisions, it is evident that his missionary zeal takes precedence over any other issue. And the missionary zeal goes together with the social dimension, as shown in the “Evangelii Gaudium” chapter entitled: ‘The social dimension of evangelization.”

Pope Francis has in fact a strong sensitivity to social issues. He had been a young militant of the “Guardia de Hierro” (the Iron Guard), a rightist branch of Peronism. And Peronism, ultimately, is not just a regime. It is a sort of “box of ideas,” where social issues, Populism, even some Christianity, are mixed up together. An Argentinean source defined Peronism a “mystic box.”

To this background, Bergoglio added the ideas of the “Theology of the People,” the Argentine branch of Liberation Theology, Marxism-free and at the same time imbued with the promotion of popular piety which Pope Francis really put at the basis of his formation. Theology of the People taught Pope Francis not to go overboard on moralism and academicism. Jorge Mario Bergoglio used to say that diocesan synods’ outcomes could be just documents to be kept on bookshelves. He rather wanted priests to spend their time with people and bring the issue of the poor of the Villas Miserias to public attention. This kind of sensitivity, Pope Francis transferred to his pontificate.

Even Pope Francis diplomatic stances are imbued with this view. Prayer is the main Pope Francis’ diplomatic tool. It was proven during the most recent trip to Israel: in a an unprecedented gesture, Pope Francis stopped to pray at the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank in the city of Bethlehem on Sunday; then, he invited the Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas for a joint prayer in his house in the Vatican; and at the end of the Ecumenical Celebrations at the Holy Sepulcher, which he celebrated with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Costantinople Bartholomew I, he was inspired by popular piety, and concluded his speech saying that «when disunity make us disheartened, let us pray the Holy Mother of God.»

As a Pontiff, Pope Francis preaches, but he does not want to take strong stances on the big issues. When he meets the most important people in the world, Pope Francis speaks to them in general terms. Last November, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, went to visit Pope Francis and told him about his difficulties within the World Bank (he is not a banker, and he faces strong internal resistance) and explained to the Pope the World Bank’s project for the poor. Pope Francis replied paternally: «I pray for you.»

Speaking to the UN agencies on May 9, Pope Francis strongly stood for the rights of the unborn children, but at the same time he did not even mention a possible reform of the United Nations, that the Holy See has been requesting for years. When Italian lawmakers asked him to have mass with them, the Pope simply made his homily on the readings of the day and then left without greeting anyone. The homily was about corruption, since the Gospel was on corruption, and perhaps the interpretation of the homily as an admonishment to politicians is too far-fetched, not reflecting the actual sense of his words.

This is how Pope Francis combines evangelization and social issues. He does not address the big issues. He just gives the Church’s view, yet trying to concretely use his influence to advance some social issue (human trafficking, the struggle against poverty) while maintaining a purely pastoral point of view.

Given these examples (and more could be provided), it is possible to assume that – after one and a half year of pontificate – Pope Francis has not been fully understood yet. His actions are interpreted through categories which are simply nonsense for a bishop nurtured in the Latin American environment. In Latin America, evangelization, social issues and popular piety are mixed together, and the big issues rarely grab the attention of people. Pastoral works comes before everything. From the other side of the ocean, the Pope’s role in the global world is considered something very far.

The international scenario is not encouraging. The United States avoided the default thanks to the debt ceiling agreement, but the credit of the United States had been first downgraded by the Chinese rating agency  Dagong  and then downgraded by Standard&Poors. In the meantime, the Holy See is working intensely to outline a reform of the world monetary system.  In the encyclical Caritas in veritate there were several points remarking it. One above all, the so-called world political authority paragraph. There is the need of a true world political authority – the Pope wrote – «in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration».

A new monetary system could not prescind from a global authority, an authority – an official to the Holy See explains – that «needs to have universal competences and needs to be public». The next G20 – scheduled in Cannes for November, 3-4 – will be on financial markets and world economy. It will be the occasion, for the Holy See, to present his proposal to reform the international monetary system. A first sketch of the reform – now under the examination of Holy See consultants and officials – had been proposed by Michel Camdessus, former president of International Monetary Fund. Camdessus is a consultant of the Holy See, but it will also be a member of the French delegation at G20. France is also the hosting country of the summit. For this reason, there is the opportunity that the proposals of the Holy See will  be at least taken in serious consideration.

Facing the global crisis, many countries began thinking about a reform of the monetary system. Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, talked about enlarging the G7 to better manage currency markets, expand the International Monetary Fund’s oversight capacity in the field, and to the IMF’s currency basket, Special Drawing Right (SDR),the currencies of emerging economies, like the Chinese yuan. «France supports modifying the IMF’s status to expand its oversight capacity», Sarkozy he noted. This can counter what the president of France views as a «proliferation of unilateral measures during crises resulting in a new financial protectionism in which all economies suffer».

The Holy See will make different proposal. The Vatican diplomacy expressed several times doubts about G20 and the international congresses of that kind, considered something more than a club of friends, with no executive power. Holy See asked for a World Government, since it knows that there is the need of an authority over the State sovereignty and with the goal of the common good. The proposal will be different even from the Camdessus first sketch. Camdessus position is more similar to French one. France – and many other countries, as well – think to a world currency in order to have a concrete currency to refer to. Since the dollar is not convertible in gold, it has no real reference in the economy. The solution the G20 is up to give can be just the one of a financial adjustments decided among the few that will met in Cannes. This – according to Holy See position – is not sufficient. In 2009, the Holy See asked the Doha round to be enlarged to the opinions of the excluded countries. This is still the Holy See position. The reform of the monetary system pass through the reform of the United Nations and the reform of International Monetary Fund. The true fight is between the world leaders that still think that the world order could be managed in restricted meeting and the ones that aim at a true multilateral policy. Camdessus first sketch was going toward the first position. Holy See is going in another direction, and its polar star is the common good of peoples.

It was the common good the goal of the delegation that gathered at Mount Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Preparing to rebuild the international economic system as World War II was still raging, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied deliberated to abandon the Gold Standard – the monetary system based on the convertibility of all the currencies in gold – and to embrace a more appropriate system for capitalism. In fact, the new international monetary system was a return to a system similar to the pre-war gold standard, only using US dollars as the world’s new reserve currency until the world’s gold supply could be reallocated via international trade.

Two projects of a new monetary system had been discussed in Bretton Woods. The first project was by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes outlined the institution of a Central World Bank, in order to intervene on the markets to regulate the relationships between debtors and creditors. The bank was supposed to have its own currency, that Keynes called Bancor. The second project was by Harry Dexter White, under-secretary of the Us  Ministry of the Treasure, and outlined a simple leveling-off fund of tax exchanges. The result was a compromise: the economic policies of the State would be coordinated by the International Monetary Fund and from the World Bank; the dollar become the only currency convertible in gold, so having a central role in the economical system.

But Europe – and in particular Germany – lived an incredible economical growth. Always more creditors asked to convert their dollars in gold. In 1971, the Us president Richard Nixon unilaterally suspended the convertibility of Us dollars in gold. It was the end of Bretton Woods. It was the beginning of a variable economy world. The yellow gold was up to be substitute by the black gold, the oil – during the Seventies the oil crisis became a central topic of financial issues.

Here and then, the idea of a world currency letted out from the think-rooms of the Council on Foreign Relations, of Trilateral commission – a group founded by David Rockfeller in 1973, whose member are, or has been, Henry Kissinger, Zygmunt Brzezinsky, George Bush sr., Dick Cheney -, and of Bildeberg Group. In 1988, The Economist – an English magazine read with much attention even in the Vatican Secretariat of State – launched the idea of a world currency named Phoenix. The International Monetary Fund created in 1969 the “embryo” of a new kind of currency, the Special Drawing Rights (SDR). SDRs are not credits the State have with the International Monetary Fund. The State, on the other hand, can sell SDRs, so sustaining their own currency. The world currency auspicated by president Sarkozy would be, in some way, and evolution of SDRs. Something similar to the “bubble that will save us” outlined a couple years ago by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, president of the I.O.R. (Institute for Religious Works, the “bank” of the Vatican), in an article on the Holy See’s daily Osservatore Romano. Something similar to what the Trilateral Commission outlined in 1989 in a report titled: “International Financial Integration: the Policy Challenges”.

The Holy See looks beyond, conscious that nowadays international finance is made up of fictitious capital. The Holy See aims to re-anchor the international monetary system to the real economy. In fact – officials of the Roman Curia underline – it was not globalization to let multinational groups and private interests take the control of global economy. It was the States to abdicate part of their sovereignty in the name of profit, and now they are stuck in the system.

In the mean time, China downgraded the United States financial rating, and this caused the fall of Western stock exchanges. Until now, China has always been marginalized by the Western economic world. But now its economy has so flourished to let the China “fire” all European and American bonds without consequences in their internal balance. China is now claiming for more weight in the international issues. Somebody is wondering – it is just an attractive hypothesis – if it was the Chinese offence for having been marginalized in the international scenario at the origin of the exacerbation of the Chinese diplomatic relationship with the Holy See.

The Holy See have a great International prestige. Neverthless the See Change campaign, the Holy See is Un Permanent Observer with reinforced powers. Every time the permanent observer speaks during the general assembly, even the sleepiest among the delegates pay much attention to the Holy See Statements. Holy See is now one of the few – if not the only one – asking for a really multilateral international policy. And it was one of the first to preview the fall of the false gods.