Nothing is impossible

Since the 14th century, the world has come to the Vatican, the walled, city-state within Rome, and never the other way around. That's changing with Pope Francis, a humble Argentinean - and son to Italian immigrants. 

"How can they know what the common people want when they build a fence around themselves?" he once said to a friend. 

Days after his election as the Pope, he celebrated the morning mass. But in the congregation sat janitors and gardeners, not the cardinals of the Roman Curia, the administrative apparatus of the Holy See. His Gospel was for the common man.

"The church asks all of us to change certain things," he said during one of his morning homilies. "She asks us to let go of decadent structures—they are useless."

Popes are expected to challenge society; Francis seems determined to bend the arc of history - by placing the poor at the centre of the Catholic Church that had been shattered by clerical sexual abuse scandals and is synonymous with theological rigidity.

 "Many of the popes have certainly said the words about poverty," said Joseph Nye, political scientist and Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. "But what Francis has been able to do is put a focus on it that isn't blurred or distracted by other things."

His compassion did not come out of thin air. While the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he mobilised the church in response to Argentina's economic crisis of 2001-02, creating a cadre of priests assigned to the slums, opening food kitchens, schools, clinics and drug rehab centres.

Since then he has leveraged his popularity to address some of the most pressing global issues, emphasising the church's historic connection to the destitute. And he has made a lot of people uncomfortable by attacking the prevailing premise - that markets and the pursuit of wealth will lift everyone - as a false ideology where refugees drown at sea and women are forced into prostitution.

Some have called him a Marxist or a Communist. But Francis refuses to be placed neatly inside an ideological box. "He delights in confounding categorisations," said Austen Ivereigh, his biographer.

His harsh critiques of environmental degradation have seized the world's attention. Last June, in an encyclical on the environment, he wrote, "It is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently organised international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions."

To those who want to hear less of morality and see more of immediate policy, the Pontiff gave his answer in an interview in 2013. "The structural and organisational reforms are secondary. The first reform must be the attitude."

The question of how much he will change the world misses the point of how much change has already taken place. His recent call to the Catholic parishes, monasteries, and convents of Europe to warmly receive migrant families has had an immeasurable impact. While addressing the joint session of the US Congress last week, he politely reminded Americans that many of them are descendants of immigrants.

The shepherd played an important hand in the recent diplomatic thaw between the United States and Cuba. He had sent a trusted confidant, Cardinal Jaime Ortega of Havana, to the White House to deliver a letter to the President of the United States. In it, he offered the Vatican's full support for diplomatic talks the two countries had secretly been pursuing, in an effort to end half a century of bellicosity.

His letter, Time wrote, "offered symbolic shelter for both sides as they weighed the political costs of reconciliation. Francis's popularity as a religious figure in the US gave Obama cover as he cut a deal with godless communists across the Straits of Florida, while the Pope's credibility as a Latin American shielded Castro as he got in bed with Yankee capitalists." 

Behind the scenes he is also trying to bring about a peaceful transition in Venezuela where the current government faces likely defeat in a parliamentary election this year - if it is free and fair. 

Francis's mission to address serious and unresolved issues, however, has alternately pleased and disappointed all sides. His push for the nuclear deal between Iran, the US and five other world powers bolstered the White House but angered Israel. The Vatican recognised Palestinian statehood back in June, infuriating the Israelis, but chose not to support Palestinians' effort to raise their flag at the UN earlier this month.

Regardless, the Palestinian flag, for the first time in history, will be raised at the UN, despite opposition from eight countries including Israel, Canada, Australia and the US.

All said and done, are the world's problems responsive to the kind of soft power Francis is deploying? The early reports seem to be mixed. When both the presidents of Palestine and Israel visited the Vatican last summer for a historic prayer summit, the three of them stood in prayer for peace.  Just a few days later, the Israeli war machine launched an offensive on the Gaza Strip. 

"At present the smoke of the bombs, the smoke of wars, does not allow the door to be seen, yet that door has remained open from that moment," he told journalists on his way back from South Korea in August.

The pope who has strongly criticised American policy in Syria has wrapped up his first ever US visit.  But President Obama and Putin are just getting started. The US and its allies are reportedly considering what was once unfathomable: a peace plan that would allow Bashar to remain in office, at least temporarily.

Real solutions for a fallen world begin with moral clarity. In offering it, Francis is pointing to what's possible.

The writer is an engineer-turned-journalist.