Had he been born in another era, Reinhard Marx would have been one of the most powerful men in Europe.

The German cardinal is the archbishop of one of the Continent’s richest dioceses, and he has spent the last six years serving as the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s most important presence in Brussels. Like Cardinal Richelieu, the 17th-century cleric who served as chief minister to King Louis XIII, Marx has close relations with the highest secular powers in Europe: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Unlike Richelieu, Marx doesn’t hold an official political position, and of course the church no longer enjoys the raw secular authority it once had. But the German cardinal is probably the best-connected clergyman in Europe, and as a result certainly one of the most powerful.

As head of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, an advocacy organization consisting of representatives of the Catholic Church from the 28 members of the European Union, Marx has waded into the European debate, in public and behind closed doors.

“Europe is going to deeply change if it builds a wall around itself and says: ‘We’re here to defend our wealth against the rest of the world.’ That’s not my Europe” — Cardinal Marx

He has, for example, urged Europeans to continue the fight against climate change after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement and called on EU institutions to “take action” against a proposed ban on the circumcision of boys proposed in Iceland by members of parliament. Most significantly, he has backed Juncker and Merkel by advocating a softer approach to migration.

Marx first met Juncker in 2002 during a visit to Luxembourg, shortly after the clergyman had become bishop of the German diocese of Trier. Marx was dining with the bishop of Luxembourg, when Juncker — then prime minister — walked into the restaurant. “He sat at the table next to mine and recognized me,” Marx recalled in a recent interview. “He’s interested in Catholic social ethics, too. Having the same background, we instantly developed a cordial relationship.”

Marx — now archbishop of Munich and Freising — is friendly too with Merkel, who first reached out to him when she was secretary-general of her Christian Democrat party. As the daughter of a protestant pastor raised in communist East Germany, she was looking for somebody who could walk her through the basics of the Catholic social ethics that underpin the CDU’s ideology. And he’s close to Manfred Weber, the Bavarian head of the conservative European People’s Party in the European Parliament.

During a recent meeting with Juncker, Marx brushed off a request from the Commission president by joking that he was just “ein kleiner Kardinal” — a small cardinal — not the pope, according to an official who witnessed the encounter.

In response, Juncker began teasing Marx about his “important, big belly,” and the two of them started cracking jokes about how fat they had become. The official couldn’t remember the nature of Juncker’s original request.

An EU of bishops

If the cardinal and the Commission president have so much is common, that’s because they share similar views — and similar adversaries. Juncker may not be overtly religious, but he has his political roots in Luxembourg’s Christian Social People’s Party, where the word of the church still counts.

Marx belongs to the Catholic Church’s more liberal wing (he was made cardinal by the conservative Pope Benedict in 2010, but his views are clearly closer to those of Pope Francis). As president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences (known in Brussels as COMECE, an abbreviation of its French name), he has often found himself facing off on issues of theology or public policy against colleagues from more conservative Eastern European countries.

COMECE includes members representing each of the EU28 (a single bishop represents Denmark, Sweden and Finland, while the U.K. has two: one for England and Wales, and one from Scotland). They meet regularly in Brussels to discuss EU policies that might affect them or their parishioners — making the organization a sort of religious parallel to the European Council. And it reflects many of its secular counterpart’s regional divides — especially when it comes to traditionally sensitive issues like abortion and homosexuality.

“We see new tensions, not only East versus West, but also within the societies in Poland and Hungary,” said Marx. “They exist also within the church.”

The disagreements can also cross over to the secular — where Marx has been unafraid to stake out more liberal positions.

In the interview, Marx was critical of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, a populist political force that has courted the Catholic Church with an embrace of conservative family values.

To Marx, the more important issue is what he described as the party’s efforts to undermine the rule of law and the country’s democratic institutions. “A movement where a parliamentary majority thinks it is the people is not what we mean by democracy,” he said.

“I know very well, the more coherent a society is, the greater the temptation of authoritarianism,” he continued. “Some dream of our societies becoming more coherent, simpler, safer, thereby turning them into identity-driven or even identitarian societies. But it is not my vision.”

Migration is another issue on which Marx has been particularly outspoken. “Europe is going to deeply change if it builds a wall around itself and says: ‘We’re here to defend our wealth against the rest of the world,’” he said. “That’s not my Europe.”

Close to the pope

Part of Marx’s power lies in his closeness to the Vatican, and in particular to Francis, who in 2013 asked him to serve as a counselor in a new structure outside the Roman Curia.

Last fall, Marx helped organize a conference in Rome on “Re-Thinking Europe,” which was attended by former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta and Sylvie Goulard, a confidant of French President Emmanuel Macron who is now deputy governor of the Bank of France.

“I got a lot of feedback that there aren’t that many opportunities where we talk with each other, not about each other,” Marx said. “There’s not enough dialogue. We want to facilitate it.”

Marx — who once published a critique of capitalism titled “Das Kapital,” playfully named after his communist namesake — has a reputation in the church as a “structural reformer.”

The diocese he oversees is one of the richest in the world. Thanks to the Kirchensteuer, a tax that registered Catholics have to pay every year in Germany, “it collects more than €5 billion a year, more than five times, for example, what is collected by the Italian Church,” according to the Vaticanista Sandro Magister.

“It has a budget higher than many small member states,” said a Vatican official.

That wealth is not just another source of power; its management has made Marx an ecclesiastical authority on financial affairs — especially after he introduced modern bookkeeping into his Munich diocese in 2016. “It took two or three years and it cost a lot of money,” he said. But in a country in which the church’s reputation has suffered from financial scandals, it was worth it.

In 2014, Francis appointed him as the head of the Vatican’s Council for the Economy. That has put him in a position to oversee the institution’s accounts, especially after the other man tasked with that job — Australian cardinal George Pell — became entangled in the church’s sex abuse scandal.

“In this moment, [Marx is] also a kind of boss of Vatican finances,” said Iacopo Scaramuzzi, a Vatican analyst.

Marx is realistic about his ability to reform an institution as famously opaque as the Vatican. “You have to look at a lot of different institutions, foundations and dicasteries, with their statutes and their own properties, to get a truly comprehensive balance sheet,” Marx said. “I’ve got my doubts about whether that can really be achieved.”

But he insists progress can — and must — be made. “There’s no choice, we need to get more transparent step by step and year by year,” Marx said. “We’ve worked on that for some years and need to do more. That’s the way to answer to some criticism at least.”

Handing over

On Thursday, Marx is stepping down as president of COMECE, as his second three-year term comes to an end and the group elects a new leader. But he’s likely to lose none of his power.

“Now we can say that we have got direct access to the cabinet of each one of the institutions" — Olivier Poquillon, general secretary of COMECE

He’ll remain as the only cardinal with easy access to the Commission president, the German chancellor and the pope. He is also a regular presence in German media and chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, giving him a platform in which to influence his country’s policies.

He’ll also have his legacy as the organization’s president to rely upon. When he arrived in 2012, relations between COMECE and the EU were cordial, but it was sometimes difficult to get a hearing, said Olivier Poquillon, general secretary of COMECE. Even though many of the leaders of the EU institutions came from the ideologically friendly European People’s Party, COMECE officials were unhappy with the low level of access that in some cases was granted to them.

Marx, during his tenure, cracked open the EU’s corridors of power.

“Now we can say that we have got direct access to the cabinet of each one of the institutions,” said Poquillon. “Even [European Council President Donald] Tusk gave us a name [we can reach out to], so that’s a positive step.”