Moments after Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in the Sistine Chapel, Cardinal Auri Alfonso Hummes whispered, "Don't forget the poor people" into the ear of the elderly Argentine who was about to chose Francis as his papal name.
The new pope did not. In his first year, Pope Francis has won a global following among Catholics and non-Catholics for his sympathy for, and solidarity with, the poor and his criticism of the excesses of capitalism. "In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which becomes the only rule," he said in November.
On Thursday in Rome, Pope Francis met another world leader, U.S. President Barack Obama, who has made income and opportunity inequality a signature theme too. In his 2012 State of the Union address, he said: "We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot."
While the President and the Pope were bound to discuss volatiles issues such as abortion and the sexual-abuse scandals that have shredded the reputation of the church, their first meeting was expected to focus on areas where they can combine their global clout to make a difference. "I think they will have common ground on poverty issues," says Father Thomas Reese, senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.
Mr. Obama, who is nearing the end of his presidential career, has had little success in narrowing the yawning income gap in the United States. The Pope, who is at the start of his career as the leader of one billion Catholics, may have more success, or he too might come up short. Many Catholics have asked whether the 77-year-old media star is more style than substance in his advocacy for the poor or, worse, a pawn in the efforts of various left-leaning presidents and prime ministers to justify their attempts to plunder the rich.
"The Obama administration intends to use this visit to use the church and the Pope as props in their 2014 class-warfare campaign," says George Weigel, senior fellow a Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of many books on the church, including last year's Evangelical Catholicism.
On the style-versus-substance argument, the Pope seems to be winning on substance. "He's talking the talk and walking the walk," says Father Reese. "He wants to change the culture of the church. He wants fewer rules and more loving one another and being concerned about the poor."
Benedict XVI, Francis's predecessor (now Pope Emeritus, after his resignation) also wrote about income inequality and the dangers of globalization and unrestrained capitalism. His encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), published in 2009, the year after the start of the international financial crisis, is considered a potent, if rather dense, treatise on the moral failings of pursing profit for its own sake, not for the benefit of mankind.
But Benedict, an accomplished ecclesiastical scholar, spoke in abstractions, lacked charisma and obviously enjoyed the trappings of the papal high life even as he preached restraint. Pope Francis is a street priest and lives like one. Gone is the papal apartment overlooking St. Peter's Square and the Mercedes limousine; he lives in a Vatican guesthouse and drives around the mini-state in a 1984 Renault that could have been plucked out of a French farmers' market. Gone are the formal papal robes and the red shoes beloved by Benedict; he dresses in an unadorned white cassock.
The simple papal packaging and papal lifestyle – Cardinal Christopher Schonborn of Austria called Francis "the pope of the poor" while the Italian press has called him "the austerity pope" – seems to be making the papacy and the church itself more approachable after a near decade of non-stop of scandal. The highlights of those dark years included the sexual abuse cover-ups, "Vatileaks" (the leaking of Vatican documents that allegedly exposed corruption) and a bank accused of money laundering.
On a cloudy morning, tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists were jammed into St. Peter's Square on Wednesday for the Pope's general audience. Francis had nothing riveting to say on the eve of Mr. Obama's visit, and a week short of a visit by the Queen. But the audience hung on his every word as he thanked pilgrims who had arrived from United States, Malta, China, Japan and elsewhere. "Upon you and your families, I invoked joy and peace in Christ our Lord," he said in several languages.
Standing near the back of the throng, John Driscoll, 30, a mechanical engineer from Cork, Ireland, said the Pope was a breath of fresh air. "Rome is an ecclesiastical Disneyland and it must be easy [for a pope] to lose sight about what is important," he said. "Francis is trying to reach out to everyone, especially those who are suffering and in the depths of poverty. I think it's sincere, not show."
Francis is not an economist, has no economic plan and is not a Marxist – he has denounced Marxism as "wrong" – but there is little doubt he believes global capitalism is creating as many problems as it solves. "He's challenging the merits of any economic system that does not take care of the poor, that is not just," Father Reese says.
In Buenos Aires, where he was archbishop, Francis supported the campaign of the waste pickers – cartoneros – for better working conditions. His help-the-poor theme has remained intact since then. Last year, at the risk of alienating conservative Catholics, especially of the American variety, he published an apostolic letter, Evangelii Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel), that was seen by some as the promotion of socialism as much as an attack on inequality. Quoting from St. John Chrysostom, he said: "Not to share one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them."
He message appears to be keeping the official poverty agenda alive. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, in January, he called for "an inclusive approach which takes into consideration the dignity of every human person and the common good." That quote reverberated around the world and was used in the speech of at least one president of a United Nations agency.
Mr. Obama's popularity rating among Americans is about half that of the Pope among Catholics. In Rome on Thursday, Francis probably tried to use Mr. Obama to elevate the issue of poverty to the top of the political agenda. If Mr. Obama wanted to do the same, he couldn't ask for a better ally.
Eric Reguly