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Yet he has been very successful in building relations between Rome and the other capitals of so-called Christian geopolitics – Constantinople ("the second Rome" of Byzantine Christianity), Moscow ("the third Rome" of Russian Orthodoxy) and New York (the cultural capital of the most militant Christian country in the world).
The pope's ability to make such connections became evident from the very beginning of his pontificate. But lately things have accelerated.
In the brief span of eight days (between April 8-16) he published the critically important post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, deftly handled the diplomatically sensitive presence of a US presidential candidate at the Vatican and traveled to Greece with two major Orthodox leaders to meet refugees being held on the island of Lesbos.
Francis' travels have been significant not only because of their physical geography; that is, their destinations. They have also sketched out another geography – a map of those figures he manages to attract and involve with him and his initiatives.
The 79-year-old pope "attracted" the collaboration of Bartholomew I, the Patriarch of Constantinople (a real partner in dialogue), and Archbishop Hieronymus, head of the Orthodox Church of Greece, one of most reluctant to dialogue with Roman Catholicism. Both were part of his dramatic visit to Lesbos.
Unexpectedly, Francis was also able to engage Kirill I, the Patriarch of Moscow, in their historic meeting in communist-ruled Cuba – one of the ironies of Church history.
These initiatives have ecumenical consequences for Catholicism as well as for Orthodoxy. The Bishop of Rome is attracting the hierarchs of Eastern Orthodoxy and helping them deal with intransigent and anti-ecumenical fringes. This is especially important now, on the eve of the historic Pan-Orthodox Synod that will take place next June in Crete.
But Francis has also allured – in an uncustomary way for the Vatican, the oldest diplomacy of the Western world – the Jewish socialist candidate for the US presidency, Bernie Sanders. The significance of this goes beyond new and surprising political alignments between the Vatican and world politicians. It also underlines the resilience of the Vatican and of papal Rome on the world scene.
Politically speaking, the Vatican is a relic of the past that owes more to the political history of Europe than to the martyrdom of Paul and Peter. But there is a resilience of that place, its symbolism, and its ability to recognize and interpret world events, that is the fruit of the Church's ability to adapt to changed conditions.
In 1870 the papacy lost Rome and its temporal power. The popes from Pius IX to Pius XI (1846-1939) grieved this loss. But in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI called it providential.
Then during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI the Vatican became the center of Church politics, the result of their efforts to centralize everything in the global Catholic Church in Rome.
But Pope Francis is now trying to make Rome the springboard for a synodal and collegial Church. It is a Church that is not wedded to Europe or to a particular culture.
It is not clear where his effort will lead. But it is clear that the Jesuit pope's view of Rome and the Vatican flows not only from his ecclesiology, but also from his reading of the signs of the times.
The trip to Lesbos was both an ecumenical pilgrimage and a visit to the immense inter-religious cemetery that the Mediterranean has become because of the waves of refugees dying at sea while trying to escape war. And one of the signs of the time is the illusion of European politicians in their attempt to rid Europe and the Mediterranean of the region's multi-religious and multi-cultural DNA.
Francis' emphasis that this is "the most serious humanitarian crisis since World War II" is another reminder that today it takes a pope from Argentina to remind Europe what Europe should be.
The attraction that Sanders and the Orthodox Churches have seen in this pope is matched by the hostility that the European political establishment has shown to his social message.
The words of Francis, Bartholomew and Hieronymus in Lesbos sent a clear message to the European Union and Turkey in regard to their policies on refugees. But their words also signaled that there are parallels between the post-World War II period and the current moment.
The period immediately after 1945 was the beginning the Catholic Church's involvement (even if slowly and cautiously) in the Christian ecumenical movement. Similarly, the present humanitarian crisis could be the birth of a new ecumenical internationalism as the world tries to help the victims of the Arab world's explosion.
This is not the construction of a complex geopolitical architecture, but a profound intuition of Pope Francis. The refugees do not know theology, but they know what the Church is. It's an example of the pastorality of doctrine that the pope has in mind. It is also a response to those who complain that his teachings lack clarity and who denigrate pastorality as being mere ecclesiastical niceties.
But, clearly, the pope's pastoral emphasis is something bigger – especially his return to Rome with twelve Muslim refugees aboard his plane. The symbolical act of liberating refugees from the camps where they are detained is also an act of Church reform.
The irony is that this disruptive political act was possible also due to the extraordinary role of the Vatican as a state, its extraterritoriality and the legacy of the pope's ancient temporal power.
The last couple of weeks have been another of those moments when Francis has put his pontificate deeply at odds with a century that has seen conservatives and reactionaries make ideological conversions to Catholicism, from Carl Schmitt in Nazi Germany to Richard John Neuhaus in the post-Reagan US Culture Wars.
It's no accident that these political conversions involved nationalists seeking an ideological refuge from cosmopolitan modernity. And it's also no accident that the response to them is the global and ecumenical spirit of Catholicism.
Follow me on Twitter @MassimoFaggioli
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