Collision course?

Commentaries  this weekend will  include the first-ever meeting between US President Barrack Obama  and Pope Francis  This came against the backdrop of the Ukrainian  crisis and the G8, now whittled down to a G7 meeting—after Russia was shown the door. 

This year's summit won't be in Russia but in Belgium. “The G8 is an informal club,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov shrugged. “No one hands out membership cards. And no one can be kicked out of it.”  There is, meanwhile, no sight of an early end to this standoff. 

Obama in 2009 called on Pope Benedict XVI, now retired. The last time a pontiff quit was in 1415 when Pope Gregory stood down to avoid schism. At the Thursday meeting, both knew that even their postures, signal worldwide audiences.

So do their differences. Obama is locked into the “legacy” phase of his presidency. In contrast, Francis just marked his first anniversary on the chair of Peter. Pending in the pontiff’s in-tray is an invitation, from the US Congress, to address a joint session.

“A Catholic and a Protestant, who disagree over flashpoints such as abortion... might seem like an odd couple,” John Gehring wrote in USA Today. “But Obama will find a warmer reception from Francis than he does from a minority of U.S. culture-warrior bishops and conservative political leaders who sometimes act as if God is a Republican.”

The pontiff shares common ground with a president who wants to raise the minimum wage, pass immigration reform and calls inequality the “defining challenge of our time…” This pope is not a maverick”. Pope Leo XIII recognized the right of workers to earn enough to provide for a family since 1891.  “Today's federal minimum wage fails that basic moral test”.

Obama’s seeks to reform an outdated U.S. immigration system. That resonates in Francis’ denunciation “globalization of indifference” at Lampedusa, An estimated 20,000  African migrants died, attempting to cross the Mediterranean and reach the Italian island.

Vatican earlier praised Obama's efforts on nuclear deterrence and disarmament. There are differences of opinion over Syria. Obama wants President Bashar al-Assad to go. The Vatican is concerned over Syria’s Christian minority, which fears that whatever follows Assad would be worse.

Media’s relentless deadlines can blur how, Francis took another unexpected decision, a week earlier on simmering issues of clerical sexual abuse and greater role for women in the church. He named initial members for a new commission to tackle these issues.

“The group includes an equal number of women and men, more laypeople than clergy plus an Irish activist Marie Collins who was abused as a 13 year old by a hospital chaplain, New York Times noted. Yet, again “Francis had deliberately shaken up the usual way of doing things at the Vatican”.

The pope left the door ajar for future Asian and African members where the church “is growing most rapidly and the issue of child sexual abuse is still taboo”.  Both the scope of its work and future members will be set by the commission itself, said Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi.

Of the five lay people Francis picked, four are women. The result is that fully half the commission’s members are female. Aside from Collins, these include:

(1) Hanna Suchocka, who served as Poland’s Prime Minister between 1992 and 1993, and who served five different Polish governments as the country’s ambassador to the Vatican;

(2) Catherine Bonnet, a well-regard child psychologist from France who has written extensively on the trauma inflicted on children by sexual abuse and exploitation; and

(3) Baroness Sheila Hollins, president of the British Medical Association and a widely consulted expert on child development issues.

“Clearly, these women aren’t window-dressing,” the Boston Globe adds. They’re accomplished experts, with deep experience of getting things done both in secular circles and in the church. “Francis can’t be blind to the fact that this also amounts to a down payment on his pledge to boost women’s roles.”

Also named was Cardinal Sean O'Malley, one of eight Francis's key advisers and the archbishop of Boston, where the US scandal erupted in 2002. The other is Humberto Miguel Yáñez, who heads the moral theology faculty at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University.

Add to that one of Francis personal secretaries: Msgr. Alfred Xuereb of Malta. “These choices signal Francis personal interest in getting the commission work.”

Forming a commission is not, in itself, reform.  Can this group help the pope hold to account some bishops and other leaders still in denial? 

“This is perhaps the first development of any real significance in this papacy when it comes to this issue,” writes Colm O’Gorman, who directs the Irish advocacy group “One in Four “. “In the past, we’ve seen such commissions, as in Australia, peter out.

“A quiet revolution is afoot in the Vatican’, reports AFP. Francis new appointments are prying loose, slowly but surely, the Curia   from the centuries-old grip of Italian apparatchiks.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI had little appetite for turf wars in Church's corridors of power. But. The world's first Latin American pontiff however has had no such qualms appointing fresh faces from diverse countries

“The pope is putting himself on a collision course with the Curia's traditional power,” said Italy's leading daily Corriere della Sera. “He is up against ferocious ambition, corruption and, sometimes, secret wantonness". But many also hope Francis will continue ignoring the gnashing of teeth from the ousted old guard.