PAPAL AUTHORITY AND POLITICAL PRESENCE IN A GLOBAL AGE

This study concentrates on an understudied yet significant source of public opinion: the Pope. I focus on the Pope’s Twitter stream because it has been active for several years and is one of the most followed social media accounts of a religious leader.^{Footnote 2} My main argument is that the Pope tends to tweet about international politics when international crises erupt. More specifically, I claim that whereas the Vatican’s Twitter account may release, on average, a mix of sermons and social messages, it is systematically more likely to focus on the latter in the direct aftermath of dramatic events in the secular world—especially if important communities are affected.

To elaborate on my theory, I discuss the political role of the Pope and why he may or may not decide to engage with secular politics when crises erupt. Generally speaking, the debate on whether the Pope is consistently in or out of politics is hardly unsettled. Some scholars believe that an apolitical church does not exist and that religious institutions are constantly involved in politics to claim issues (Bueno De Mesquita Reference Bueno De Mesquita2000). By contrast, other scholars believe that religious institutions are well aware that engaging with politics can negatively affect their reputation and consequently do not consistently engage with it (Putnam and Campbell Reference Putnam and Campbell2012). Against this light, even a Pope as socially active as Francis may be aware that making the church too political may hurt religious retention and that the papacy may be better off speaking out for some events and staying neutral on others (Plantak Reference Plantak1998).

I argue that the Pope may be more prone to directly address politics when political events affect communities that the Catholic Church deems most relevant, including religious minorities, poor Catholic groups, and vulnerable Christian populations. Thus, if critical issues threaten these groups or secular jurisdictions seem unprepared to protect these communities, then the Pope may be more inclined to make explicit references to the state of the world and the political problems surrounding such issues. Conversely, if a political event does not critically affect such communities, the Pope may be more reluctant to send a message of political concern on social media.^{Footnote 3}

Because this article focuses mainly on Pope Francis, it is worth discussing whether my theory may be pertinent only to Bergoglio’s papacy. Evidently, not all Popes are the same, and some scholars have argued that Pope Francis—whose background is itself novel to the Catholic Church—has shown a particular predisposition for particular issues such as environmental degradation, immigration, poverty in the Global South and for spiritual reform more generally.^{Footnote 4} Despite the remarkable features of the current Pope, I argue that the idiosyncrasies of Francis’s papacy do not necessarily determine the basic pattern of the Vatican leader’s messages on the Internet. Stated differently, I expect that the statements of Pope Francis on Twitter still reflect the long-standing interests of the Catholic Church to protect its more vulnerable communities, which then emerge in the pontiff’s reactions on social media.

In fostering this argument, this article suggests that the advent of digital communications has not undermined the popular legitimacy of the pontiff’s traditional leadership. Rather, the Internet has allowed the papacy to claim influence on global issues in that it has integrated the promotion of concerns of vulnerable communities in the Vatican leader’s online statements. Hence, this article also seeks to contribute to the theory of power in the information-technology sphere and to the long-standing debate captured by the equalization-versus-normalization literature (Gainous and Wagner Reference Gainous and Wagner2014; Margolis and Resnick Reference Margolis and Resnick2000). Whereas according to equalization scholars, the Internet is a force that allows “outsiders” to compete over issues with power holders (Barber Reference Barber2001; Corrado and Firestone Reference Corrado and Firestone1996), for normalization scholars, the web reinforces the advantage of incumbents (Hindman Reference Hindman2009; Stromer-Galley Reference Stromer-Galley2014). Against this light, my argument is in line with the equalization hypothesis, in that digital media gives the Pope a powerful way to comment on issues that, strictly speaking, are otherwise left to secular institutions to address. At the same time, I argue that new media has crystalized the Pope’s tradition of addressing issues that affect important religious communities. Thus, when issues become particularly salient to the Vatican, social media provides the Pope with an opportunity structure for his message to be spread and for the authority of the Church to be reinforced. Within the boundaries of this article, this leads me to expect that in the midst of international crises, the Pope is more likely to voice political concerns on social media, ceteris paribus.

INTERNATIONAL CRISES AND THE POPE’S POLITICAL TWEETS

For my empirical analysis, I referred to Twitter because the Pope has no official account in any other large social network. Also, Twitter allows for short communications that can reflect only a small number of topical issues. Consequently, the nature of Twitter statements was useful for testing my hypothesis that the Pope should systematically engage global political events and address concerns at the outset of international crises.^{Footnote 5}

I collected all of the tweets from the @Pontifex English-language account from March 17, 2013, through March 26, 2017. The body of texts refers to messages only by Pope Francis because all tweets by Pope Benedict XVI were archived after his February 2013 resignation and were too few to justify a quantitative text analysis.^{Footnote 6} The total number of papal tweets in my sample was 1,142 observations. It is not surprising that the most frequent words mentioned in the tweets (i.e., more than 130 times) were God, love, and Jesus. However, words such as families, poverty, and work were repeated more than 25 times, hinting at some consistent reference to other social and political issues.^{Footnote 7}

As for the temporal patterns of the Pope’s tweeting activity, the median number of tweets per week was five: on average, the Pope releases one message per working day and rarely tweets on weekends. However, as shown in figure 1, at times the volume of tweets increases well above the median. The highest peak in the 2013–2017 period corresponds to the week of the release of the “Laudato Si” encyclical on June 18, 2015, when @Pontifex tweeted more than 60 times. The second densest window of tweets was the week of International World Youth Day, an event in July 2016 that focused on Catholic faith among the young generations. Relevant to the hypothesis explored here, the Pope also released a significant number of tweets at the outset of international crises. For example, in June 2014, the Pope tweeted more than 20 times in a row about the Christian Iraqi genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State. This suggests how outspoken the pontiff can be regarding political issues involving Christians around the world. A similar pattern is shown in retweets of the Pope’s messages (figure 2). Overall, the public pays significant attention to papal tweets and (as of the end of 2017), on average, a tweet by Pope Francis receives roughly 8,000 retweets. However, in the past, specific messages have had higher success among his followers. These include statements about communal gatherings, such as the Pope’s visit to the Philippines in January 2015, but also inherently political events such as the Paris terror attack in November 2015 and Donald Trump’s 13769 Executive Order renowned as his first “Muslim ban” in February 2017.

Figure 1

Papal Tweets and Selected International Events (As of Tweets Collected in March 2017)

Figure 2

Retweets of Papal Messages and Selected International Events (As of Tweets Collected in March 2017)

These descriptive findings pointed to the Pope’s sensitivity to events in the political world as suggested by my hypothesis; however, to systematically evaluate my expectation, I proceeded with an automated content analysis of the papal tweets.^{Footnote 8} First, I used a topic-model estimation to explore the extent to which political themes are discernible from the more “spiritual” ones in papal tweets. I then estimated whether the more-political tweets could be associated to times of political crisis. Technically, following a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach, I relied on an unsupervised topic model that found sets of words associated with the documents’ latent dimensions (Blei, Ng, and Jordan Reference Blei, Ng and Jordan2003).^{Footnote 9} I pursued the LDA estimation to assess the systematic correlations of words in the body of tweets. In other words, I treated this as the first step to inductively identify topics that may be more or less politically based on a probability distribution over terms. In a second step—and assuming that the LDA process could identify political themes in the papal messages—I tested whether the onset of sudden political events (i.e., crises) is a significant correlate of the topical content of the papal tweets. To do so, I used a Structural Topic Model (STM), which allows covariates such as the onset of political crises to be included in the topic estimation (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Nielsen, Roberts, Stewart, Storer and Tingley2015).

It is worth noting that, following common estimation practices, I explored the topic density in the Pope’s tweets with a so-called perplexity score, which is an LDA-based metric in which a lower value indicates better generalization performance (Chang et al. Reference Chang, Boyd-Graber, Wang, Gerrish and Blei2009). I calculated the perplexity score for 20 LDA models with a number of topics set from two through eight using different initialization values to ensure that my conclusions were not driven by the starting parameters. The values suggest that the identification of the topics improved significantly with more than three topics and only minimally after eight topics.^{Footnote 10} In the main analysis, I reported the results based on eight topics to allow for more subtle variations across the tweets; however, the substantive findings remained unaltered when I performed alternative estimations.

I first ran the basic LDA estimation. I removed basic English-language stop words and estimated the topic models 50 times using different random initialization values to ensure that my conclusions were not driven by the starting parameters. The LDA decomposed the words of the 1,142 tweets into eight clusters and provided a list of words loading on each dimension (figure 3). The eight topics were not exclusive in that some words overlapped, such as God, Jesus, and love. This suggests that most of the tweets consistently repeated the classical wording of the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, some words were more exclusive than others (e.g., peace, lives, brothers, and family), most of which were especially clustered on some topics (i.e., topics 2 and 8), which accounted for almost 20% of the tweets. These terms corresponded to messages such as “We pray for the earthquake victims in Ecuador and Japan, may God and all our brothers and sisters give them help and support” (tweeted on April 18, 2016, after the Kumamoto and Ecuador earthquakes); “We run the risk of forgetting the suffering which doesn’t affect us personally—may we respond to it and may we pray for peace in Syria” (tweeted on June 14, 2006, as ISIS declared a caliphate); and “May every parish and religious community in Europe host a refugee family” (tweeted on September 8, 2015, as thousands of refugees crossed Eastern Europe). Overall, these tweets extended the Pope’s message of solidarity in moments of social despair and humanitarian disaster to salient communities around the world.

Figure 3

LDA Topic Model of Papal Tweets

Note: This figure illustrates results of an eight-topic LDA estimation process with 50 random initialization values and indicates the relative loadings of papal tweets on the identified topics. Boldfaced words are unique loading words that are relevant for my analysis. N=1,142 tweets.

To summarize, results from the LDA analysis suggested that on contentious contemporary issues, the Pope’s tweets seem to focus on more political themes. This finding fits with the claim that it is in the Pope’s interest—or, in fact, moral domain—to encompass social concerns in the daily preaching of the Catholic Church (Wald, Owen, and Hill Reference Wald, Owen and Hill1988). Hence, the Pope seems capable of capitalizing on Twitter and strengthening its authority by addressing real-world contemporary issues (Campbell Reference Campbell2010). However, to fully validate this claim, we must ask: Is the timing of the more political tweets systematically correlated to critical international political events?

To verify the second part of my argument, I ran an STM analysis, which allows the calculation of statistical correlations between topics (i.e., the outcome variable) and external covariates at the tweet-level of analysis. To run STM, I generated the binary variable “event,” which took the value of 1 if the day in which the tweet was published was one that included political events such as conflicts, diplomatic failures, and unexpected disasters (t = event).^{Footnote 11} To stay consistent with the previous analysis, I specified the model for eight topics. My argument suggests that topics that captured more-political themes should be correlated with crises because they should lead to more active political expressions by the Vatican’s leader. For example, as shown in figure 3, the words in topics 2 and 8 should be significantly and positively correlated with the “event” covariate.

I estimated the mean difference in topic proportions for the two different values of the covariate (i.e., 0 for no event and 1 for event). Figure 4 presents these results, controlling for the number of retweets and “likes.” The point estimates with respect to topics 2 and 8 are positive and statistically significant at the 90% level. This is evidence that the Pope is more likely to discuss the themes captured by these topics (and words such as followers as well as families and others) at the outset of critical events in the secular world. Conversely, more “doctrinal” words (e.g., topic 6) are less likely to be tweeted in days when political events occur. The results remained overall unaltered when I estimated the STM model with fewer topics and when I omitted from the analysis the observations following Brexit and the 2016 American elections. These events alone may have triggered a more uncertain political atmosphere and thus more political tweets (additional estimations are in the appendix). In summary, the evidence supports the expectation that shape and timing of papal tweets are deeply correlated with international crises around the world.

Figure 4

The Effect of International Events and Crises on Papal Tweets

This figure illustrates the statistical influence of international crises on the content of papal tweets. The estimation is based on an STM specified with eight topics. Each dot corresponds to the estimated coefficient; the line corresponds to the 90% confidence interval. N=1,142 tweets.

Despite this evidence, we still may question whether the sensitivity to international crises and the expression of concern on Twitter are a function of the personal idiosyncrasies of the Pope in charge. Recall that the first Pope to ever use Twitter was Benedict XVI in December 2012. Is it possible that the format and timing of Pope Benedict’s tweets differ significantly from Pope Francis, the “modern” Pope? Stated differently: Is social media truly strengthening the Vatican’s outreaching tradition in moments of crisis, or is this a characteristic of Francis’s papacy? Unfortunately, there are too few data to systematically compare Francis’s and Benedict XVI’s social media presence to test personality trends in their tweets. Pope Benedict XVI resigned on February 11, 2013, having tweeted only 39 times. However, the qualitative evaluation of his tweets does not suggest that he would have been less likely than Pope Francis to raise political concerns at the outset of international crises. Of 39 texts, two are particularly similar to the more-“political” tweets of Pope Francis: (1) following the 2012 Christmas shootings in Nigeria by Islamic militants (“Nigerians have a special place in my heart, as so many have been victims of senseless violence in recent months”); and (2) on Syria’s conflict, at the outset of a UN human rights report issued on January 4, 2013 (“Please join me in praying for Syria so that constructive dialogue will replace the horrendous violence”). These tweets share some words with topics 2 and 8 from the previous LDA analysis, and they are the only tweets by Benedict XVI that use terms such as dialogue and violence, which suggest a distinct type of social message. I interpreted this as further evidence that the Catholic Church—and not Pope Francis per se—uses media communication to expand its influence and claim issues occurring to relevant communities all over the world.^{Footnote 12}

Finally, we may question whether the results have implications for the media usage of only the Pope or also for other global spiritual leaders who may be as sensitive to international crises. To explore this, I collected the Dalai Lama’s tweets for the same years used in my papal analysis. The pattern of tweeting of the Dalai Lama is basically similar to the Pope’s in that both tweet regularly (the former slightly less frequently than the pontiff at a rate of one tweet every three days). I ran the same type of quantitative text analyses on this text corpus, using the same coding of crisis events as in the previous analysis (results are in the appendix). The direction of the findings suggests that the Dalai Lama may have a propensity to tweet more about anger, tolerance, peace, and change and less about teaching and affairs in Dharamsala when a crisis occurs. However, these estimates overlap and do not reach the 90% confidence level. This null result may be driven in part by the smaller sample of the Dalai Lama’s tweets but also because the Buddhist leader represents a smaller and more confined community of followers. Consequently, the international events coded in my dataset, on average, may be beyond the authoritative mandate of the Dalai Lama. This interpretation strengthens the thesis that the Vatican, as a truly global actor, is more likely to issue political tweets when it deems that crises affect salient groups around the world.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518001038