The yellow and white flag bearing the seal of the Holy See, with its keys to the kingdom of heaven given by Jesus Christ to Saint Peter, floats on the blue cabin. The plane of the Italian national company ITA Airways used by the Pope for his international travel has just landed at Budapest airport on this particularly sunny morning in April 2023. On the runway, an official delegation waits for François to come ashore by a special basket provided for this purpose. The sovereign pontiff, who suffers from knee pain, almost only moves around in a wheelchair. In a few minutes, the head of the Catholic Church will be entitled to military honors on the square adjoining the Sandor Palace, the official residence of the Hungarian presidency. After greeting the head of state at the time, Katalin Novak, seated at his side during the ceremony, he will speak for twenty long minutes with the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.
The Pope may well be the spiritual guide of more than 1.3 billion Catholics around the world – 2.9 million in Hungary – but he did not come to talk about religion. There will be a mass, on the imposing Kossuth Square, at the end of the trip. There needs to be one. But the trip has another objective: Francis is there to talk about war and peace. He came to share with Viktor Orban, a leader with authoritarian tendencies close to Moscow, his vision of the conflict in Ukraine.
The two men, who have disagreed for a long time, particularly on the issue of migrants – defended by François and whom Orban does not want on his territory – have one thing in common: they hold, for different reasons and in opposition to most Western countries, the same speech on the need for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
“The Vatican, how many divisions? »
Microscopic State of 44 hectares nestled in the heart of Rome, the Vatican and its elected sovereign, Pope Francis, are not content with administering the religious life of Catholics, they also intend to participate in world affairs. To do this, the sovereign pontiff relies on the know-how of an army of diplomats in Roman collars, who are busy behind the scenes. Addressing Winston Churchill who asked him to listen to requests from the Holy See at the end of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin made this famous response: “The Vatican, how many divisions? »
After losing its territories in central Italy thanks to the unification of the country in the second half of the 19th centurye century, the Holy See, devoid of army, economic power and population, retained only one of the state attributes: diplomacy, put at the service of mediation between powers. “Even after the fall of the temporal power of the popes as sovereigns of Rome and the Papal States, the Holy See managed to remain an interlocutor of the States which appealed to it for its role of arbiter”, explains Roberto Regoli, professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
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