Richard Delevan

In one of his first speeches after being elected, Pope Leo XIV told cardinals he had chosen the name Leo because he felt the Catholic Church needed to update its social teaching in the age of artificial intelligence, in the same way that Pope Leo XIII wrote about the role of labour in the factory age of industrial capitalism - 135 years ago, called Rerum Novarum.

You may not believe in geopolitics. But geopolitics believes in you. Seven weeks ago most people would have struggled to find the Strait of Hormuz on a map. But if you worked in energy or geopolitics you’d know it for what it was: an exposed jugular of the global economy for the past 50 years. 20% of the world’s exported oil and natural gas and 25% of the world’s fertilisers have to travel through that 33 km-wide mouth of the Gulf (1 km more narrow than the English Channel).

More than four years after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, like many of her compatriots Svitlana Romanko may have lost faith in the multilateral system. “ There is no hope in multilateralism, unfortunately, left in the country where I live because as been we’ve been witnessing so far over three and a half years, the international order has been quite outdated and it needs complete renewal,” she told a conference in Rome I attended last October.