What would Beijing have made of Pope Francis’s recent visit to Myanmar? China’s Communist leaders may have scoffed scornfully, as Stalin once did, asking, “How many divisions has the Pope?” He was referring to military formations – a Second World War infantry division consisted of around 10,000 men. But that would be to miss, like Stalin did, the moral force of a papal utterance: soft power rather than hard power. It was papal soft power applied by John Paul II to the critical pressure point of Poland that helped destabilise the Soviet Empire, an achievement beyond the reach of 100 divisions of infantry.