President Barack Obama talks with Pope Francis at the Vatican, March 2014.

WASHINGTON: The Vatican remains one of the world’s great powers. Pope Francis can’t deploy divisions, so Stalin might dismiss him and his organization. However, I’ve never forgotten a comment by Doug Simon, one of my Drew University political science professors at a semester I spent studying the United Nations. “Who do you think has the best intelligence organization in the world? The Vatican.”

Judge an intelligence organization by the breadth and depth of its human sources. No one comes close to the Vatican. Judge an intelligence organization by the commitment of its sources. Few people are as devoted to their causes as are Catholics and few organizations have the depth of experience in managing human interests. And, of course, there is the huge pool of experts in most of the world’s languages.

The New York Times ran an interesting piece on the details of how the Pope helped prod and encourage both the Castro brothers and President Obama to break the stupid logjam of domestic and international politics that had frozen Cuban and American positions in place for so long. The Vatican used access, moral suasion, the Pope’s unique status as the first Latin to hold his job and its relatively low profile, since it doesn’t have divisions or a huge economy to help it extend credit and to bend the world to its will.

With Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting here the day after the Pope leaves town, you can be certain Pope Francis will mention the plight of the Chinese Catholic Church and its followers, locked in a persistent struggle with the Chinese Communist Party and China’s government over who leads the flock. The CCP, in keeping with its mindless need to turn away all challenges to its authority, has claimed the right to appoint bishops and other church officials and has lately taken to ripping down crosses.

That has led church officials to rise up in defense of their flocks, even going so far as to raise the specter most dreaded by China’s ruling oligarchs: democracy and law. The New York Times reported this in early August: “An open letter, signed by the bishop of Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang Province, and 26 priests, said, ‘Recently the situation has intensified.’ The government, they said, ‘has stopped using the pretext of ‘demolishing illegal structures’ and is rushing to take down the crosses of every single church. As Chinese citizens, we yearn for deeper and more comprehensive democracy and the rule of law,” the letter said.'”

Combine the Catholic Church’s repression, the Pope’s moral authority, the church’s vast reach and China’s continuing arrogance in building fake islands and claiming they have sovereignty over them, and you’ve got a pretty compelling set of reasons for the US to press the Chinese for change — quietly and subtly.

Be sure that Pope Francis will keep nudging and smiling and sending letters to Obama and Xi, doing it all quietly, with authority, and reliant on that enormous intelligence base.