Forget being an Argie expansionist. Pope Francis looks to be a Northern nationalist, with his motto taken from a sermon preached at Jarrow by a man who is buried at the back of Durham Cathedral. Saint Bede the Venerable, the only English Doctor of the Church until Blessed John Henry Newman is canonised, is my Confirmation Saint, and the Patron of the school where I was a pupil for seven years and a governor for eight.
That ridiculous Kirchner person apparently wants the Holy Father to intervene in the Falklands dispute on behalf of his native land. Silly woman. She obviously doesn't have a clue how the Petrine Office works. It is hardly as if she ever did anything to merit his goodwill during his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. As a proportion of the Catholic population, Argentina is probably no more observantly Catholic a country than Britain on a week by week basis.
The only thing that he could say would be the truism that the two countries needed to do everything possible in order to avoid bloodshed. And in any case, like the last one's love affair with Newman, this Pope would seem to have a pronounced Anglophile streak, not unusual historically in South America or in Argentina, nor, for that matter, among Jesuits. Even to the point of taking as his motto some words of "the father of our English learning". Ora pro nobis.
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