Geopopelitics
- Isabella Lake
- Apr 22
- 2 min read
On Easter Monday, as Christians worldwide celebrated that Christ rose, Pope Francis died at age 88 of complications from bronchitis.
Francis was known for his strong activist policies in the Vatican, including his open recognition of the Israeli-aggressed humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Under his leadership, the Vatican recognized Palestine’s statehood in 2015, and Francis perished shortly after a speech again highlighting the conflict in front of millions of Catholic viewers on Easter Sunday.
As the Vatican seeks to replace Pope Francis, questions of Catholic geopolitics loom in media spaces asking who’s next. Francis, an Argentine, was the first non-European to lead the Church since 741, and was taken by many to represent a vast Catholic population in South America. A top African candidate, Fridolin Ambongo, might be selected for his proximity to an 18% Catholic African continent, though he is part of a generally conservative faction who led the charge against blessing homosexual couples in 2023. Pietro Parolin, an Italian, is also noted for his international policy with China and Vietnam on behalf of the Vatican. Luis Antonio Tagle, from the Philippines, has been dubbed the “Asian Francis” for his left-leaning views, and may be selected in accordance with Francis’ vision of building a less Eurocentric future for the Church.
The political concerns of the Vatican at this time provide ample opportunity for reflecting on globalized religions in the 21st-century. Historians have commonly noted that religion, especially Catholicism, was once used as a pretext for European domination in the colonial world. However, as French public research institution IRD argues, “perhaps more than any other cultural domain in the global south, the field of religion appears to have undergone a spectacular process of decolonisation.”
Across developing countries, religion has developed its own unique set of dynamics, manifesting in ways which some devotees might see as karmic retribution. Just one of these is local spiritualism in Africa, which has combined European gospel with the very ‘paganist’ religious principles that it was intended to ward off. Africa is furthermore the Vatican’s largest source of seminarians globally, making the continent a geopolitical player in a game which once considered it to be a token.
Catholicism aside, developing countries across the world have come to follow another rmonotheistic giant: Islam. Muslims represent 1.6 billion (to Christianity’s 2.2 billion) adherents in the world, followed by 1.1 billion religious non-adherents in third place. In multiple eras across history, pan-Islamist aspirations have surged across political circles. With overwhelming percentages of Muslims across countries in the Global South supporting Islamist governance and sharia law, could Islam be an adequate contender to unify a political bloc against traditional, Eurocentric, and Christian governance models?
What is the future of religion and geopolitics in the post-colonial, decolonial, or anti-colonial, era? A new pope will be chosen—but who’s choice is it really?
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