Vatican Diplomacy Course

Course Overview

The Holy See is one of the most unusual actors in the history of international relations. It commands no army, controls no significant territory beyond 0.44 square kilometres in Rome, possesses no natural resources, and levies no taxes on a national economy. It is, by every conventional measure of international power, negligible. And yet it maintains full diplomatic relations with over 180 states, sends and receives ambassadors, participates as a permanent observer in the United Nations and a range of other multilateral institutions, has mediated some of the most consequential diplomatic episodes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, shaped the terms of international debate on migration, climate, human rights, bioethics, and peace, and speaks with an authority that secular states and international institutions have never been fully able to ignore or dismiss. Understanding why requires the analytical tools of international relations, diplomacy studies, history, and political theology applied simultaneously to a subject that resists easy categorisation.

This course examines Vatican diplomacy as a sustained analytical issue in international relations. It asks what kind of actor the Holy See is, how its distinctive form of influence works, through what institutional and diplomatic mechanisms it operates, and how it navigates the tension between the universal moral claims inherent in its self-understanding and the specific geopolitical realities of a world organised around sovereign states, competing great powers, and contested normative frameworks. The curriculum moves from the foundational questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and theoretical framing through the historical evolution of papal diplomacy, the major instruments through which the Holy See engages internationally, and the substantive issue areas — conflict mediation, migration, climate, human rights, and relations with major powers — in which Vatican diplomacy has its most visible contemporary presence.

Teaching is organised around major analytical questions and structured debates that resist easy resolution. Each week, students investigate a central problem through primary diplomatic and theological sources, historical case studies, international relations theory, and contemporary policy analysis, building towards independent research and policy-oriented work. The course demands intellectual engagement across disciplinary boundaries: students who approach it expecting either conventional IR theory or religious apologetics will find neither. What they will find is a subject of genuine analytical complexity that rewards serious, evidence-based inquiry.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Critically evaluate the Holy See as an actor in international relations and global governance, applying and assessing theoretical frameworks from IR, diplomacy studies, and political theology.
• Analyse the historical evolution and institutional foundations of Vatican diplomacy, from the Congress of Westphalia to the present.
• Apply theoretical perspectives — including constructivism, normative power theory, soft power analysis, and mediation theory — to the study of religious diplomacy.
• Assess the role of normative authority, moral advocacy, and transnational networks in Vatican foreign relations.
• Examine Vatican engagement in international debates concerning conflict mediation, migration, climate governance, human rights, and interreligious dialogue.
• Navigate and critically interpret primary diplomatic, institutional, theological, and historical sources relevant to Vatican diplomacy.
• Construct independent, evidence-based analytical arguments in written and oral forms.
• Develop policy-oriented and research-based analyses at advanced academic standard.

Assessment

Seminar Participation and Engagement — 20%
Active, substantive participation is an intellectual and professional expectation, not an optional supplement to the written work. Students are assessed on the quality of their contributions across the semester: the rigour of their arguments, their engagement with theoretical frameworks, their willingness to challenge and build upon the ideas of others, and the consistency of their preparation. Students who attend without contributing meaningfully will not score well on this component. Students who lead discussions, introduce evidence from primary diplomatic or theological sources, or connect weekly debates to wider theoretical and historical frameworks will be recognised accordingly.

Primary Source Analysis — 20%
A structured analytical paper of 1,500 to 2,000 words examining a significant Vatican diplomatic document, papal encyclical, or primary source of direct relevance to the course. Students select a source from a provided list and analyse its diplomatic, theoretical, and strategic dimensions: the context of its production, the normative claims it advances, its intended audience, and its real-world effects on international debate or bilateral relationships. The paper should demonstrate command of the relevant literature, precision in the use of concepts, and clarity of argument. It is submitted at the end of Week 6.

Strategic Diplomatic Brief — 20%
A diplomatic brief of 1,000 to 1,500 words addressed to a specified audience: a Vatican diplomatic mission, a state foreign ministry engaged with the Holy See, or an international institution in which the Holy See participates. Students identify a current challenge relevant to Vatican diplomacy, assess its implications, and recommend a course of action, with explicit attention to the normative, strategic, and geopolitical dimensions of the situation. The brief should combine analytical depth with the clarity of purpose expected of a professional diplomatic document. It is submitted at the end of Week 9.

Mediation Simulation and Presentation — 10%
A structured mediation simulation held in Weeks 10 and 11, in which students represent the Holy See, state parties, international organisations, and civil society actors in a simulated diplomatic mediation exercise. Each student prepares a position paper of 500 words in advance and participates in the negotiation. Assessment focuses on preparation quality, strategic and normative coherence during the simulation, and a brief reflective presentation of five minutes delivered afterwards. Detailed instructions and role assignments are distributed at the end of Week 7.

Final Research Essay — 30%
An extended research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words addressing a substantive question in Vatican diplomacy or the broader study of religious actors in international relations. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they situate it clearly within the relevant theoretical debate, engage with primary sources and academic literature, and advance an original analytical claim. A one-page essay proposal is submitted at the end of Week 8 for feedback before the final deadline in Week 13.

Literature

• Gaetan, V. (2023). God’s diplomats: Pope Francis, Vatican diplomacy, and America’s armageddon. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Riebling, M. (2016). Church of spies: The Pope’s secret war against Hitler. Basic Books.
• Spadaro, A., Fulginiti, G., Guida, D., & Mormino, T. (2026). The diplomacy of Pope Francis: The Vatican and international politics. Georgetown University Press.
• Stummvoll, A. A. (2018). A Living Tradition: Catholic Social Doctrine and Holy See Diplomacy. Cascade Books.

Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:

• Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis from international relations, diplomatic history, religious studies, and political theology.
• Primary diplomatic and magisterial documents — including papal encyclicals, apostolic exhortations, concordats, statements by the Secretariat of State, and Holy See submissions to international institutions — constitute the primary material through which Vatican foreign policy is formulated, justified, and projected internationally. Reading these documents critically, as diplomatic texts embedded in specific historical and political contexts, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.
• Historical case studies and contemporary policy analyses, produced by diplomatic historians, international relations scholars, and policy institutes, provide the empirical grounding for theoretical and analytical argument. Where sources reflect partisan religious or secular positions, students are expected to identify and account for those perspectives in their analysis rather than accepting or dismissing them unreflectively.

Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.

Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.

Structure

Week 1 — How should the Vatican be understood within international relations?

The Holy See presents a genuine puzzle for international relations theory. It is a sovereign entity recognised under international law, yet it governs no nation in the conventional sense. It is a religious institution whose head is simultaneously a head of state, a spiritual authority to more than 1.3 billion Catholics, and a diplomatic actor with representation in the capitals of most of the world’s governments. It possesses legal personality at international law, accredits and receives ambassadors, concludes treaties known as concordats, and participates in multilateral institutions, yet it does all of this without the economic, military, or territorial foundations that conventional IR theory treats as the preconditions of meaningful international actorness. The theoretical frameworks available to analyse it — realism, liberalism, constructivism, normative power theory — each illuminate something real about Vatican diplomacy while leaving significant aspects unaccounted for. This week establishes the analytical vocabulary and theoretical orientation for the course, asking students to confront from the outset what kind of object of inquiry Vatican diplomacy actually is.

Key Themes

• The Holy See as an international actor: legal personality, diplomatic standing, and the distinction between the Holy See and Vatican City State
• Sovereignty, legitimacy, and the anomalous status of the Papacy in international law
• Religion and international relations theory: the secularist assumption and its analytical costs
• Political theology and global order: Schmitt, Maritain, and the contested foundations of international authority

Core Debates

• Can religious actors possess genuine geopolitical influence without material power, or is Vatican influence ultimately reducible to the political calculations of states that find it useful?
• Is Vatican diplomacy best understood through constructivism and normative theory, or does realist analysis better account for the strategic calculations embedded in its practice?

Case Studies

• The Holy See at the Congress of Vienna, 1814 to 1815: restoration, legitimacy, and the limits of papal influence in a secular peace settlement
• The development of modern Vatican diplomatic recognition: the path from the Lateran Treaty to the present network of bilateral relations

Seminar Exercise

• Theoretical mapping: students are assigned one theoretical framework from IR or political theology and tasked with writing a short analysis of a specified Vatican diplomatic episode from that framework’s perspective, then presenting their analysis to the seminar for collective evaluation of which account proves most analytically productive and why.

Analytical Focus

• Building the conceptual vocabulary for the course; evaluating the adequacy of standard IR frameworks for a non-standard actor; establishing the analytical relationship between the Holy See’s unique institutional character and its foreign policy behaviour

Week 2 — How did Vatican diplomacy emerge historically?

Vatican diplomacy is among the oldest continuous diplomatic traditions in the world. Papal legates were dispatched to the courts of Europe centuries before modern states or modern diplomacy existed in their current forms, and the theoretical foundations of modern international law — in Vitoria, Suarez, and Grotius — are deeply indebted to the scholastic tradition the Church sustained. The question of how a specifically Catholic diplomatic tradition emerged, what structural transformations it underwent, and how the loss of the Papal States in 1870 and the resolution of the Roman Question in 1929 shaped its modern form is not merely a historical question: it is analytically foundational for understanding why Vatican diplomacy looks as it does today, what institutional memory and historical legitimacy it draws upon, and where the structural tensions between its universal religious mission and its particular diplomatic interests originate. This week traces that history with analytical rather than merely narrative intent.

Key Themes

• Papal diplomacy in medieval and early modern Europe: legates, nuncios, and the infrastructure of ecclesiastical diplomacy
• The Peace of Westphalia and its contested significance for the Vatican’s subsequent diplomatic trajectory
• The loss of the Papal States in 1870 and the transformation of the Papacy from territorial to spiritual and diplomatic power
• The Lateran Treaty of 1929: the creation of Vatican City State, the concordat with Mussolini, and the settlement of the Roman Question
• The institutional development of the Secretariat of State as the central organ of Vatican diplomacy

Core Debates

• To what extent is contemporary Vatican diplomacy shaped by historical continuity, and to what extent has each major institutional rupture — Westphalia, 1870, 1929 — produced a genuinely different kind of diplomatic actor?
• How did the loss of territorial sovereignty transform rather than diminish papal diplomatic capacity?

Case Studies

• The Congress of Westphalia, 1648: papal protest, diplomatic exclusion, and the long shadow of Westphalian sovereignty on Vatican diplomacy
• The Lateran Accords of 1929: political bargain, institutional settlement, and the model of concordat diplomacy it established

Seminar Exercise

• Historical source analysis: students examine a specified primary document from Vatican diplomatic history — a papal brief, a concordat text, or a diplomatic instruction — identifying the political context, the normative claims advanced, the intended audience, and the relationship between the document’s religious language and its diplomatic objectives.

Analytical Focus

• Historical institutionalism applied to Vatican diplomacy; connecting institutional origins and historical ruptures to contemporary diplomatic practice; evaluating the analytical significance of historical continuity for understanding a diplomatic actor whose legitimacy is explicitly grounded in tradition

Week 3 — Can normative authority function as diplomatic power?

The concept of soft power, developed by Joseph Nye to describe influence achieved through attraction rather than coercion, provides one useful but insufficient framework for understanding how the Vatican exercises international influence. Moral authority, historical legitimacy, the capacity to articulate universal ethical principles that resonate across cultural and political boundaries, the ability to mobilise a transnational network of over a billion adherents and tens of thousands of Catholic institutions across every world region — these are instruments of influence that do not fit neatly into either hard power or soft power categories. Nor is the Vatican simply a norm entrepreneur in the constructivist sense: its normative claims are grounded in a theological anthropology that it regards as universally binding, not as preferences to be negotiated. This week examines normative authority as a form of diplomatic power, asking under what conditions it is politically effective, what its limits are, and how the Vatican’s specific form of normative authority compares with the normative claims advanced by other international actors.

Key Themes

• Soft power and moral authority: similarities, differences, and the limits of Nye’s framework for religious actors
• Norm entrepreneurship and normative authority: constructivist approaches and their application to the Vatican
• Transnational Catholic networks as instruments of diplomatic influence
• Symbolic legitimacy and the politics of papal communication: encyclicals, apostolic journeys, and public diplomacy
• The relationship between doctrinal consistency and diplomatic flexibility

Core Debates

• Is moral authority politically effective in contemporary international relations, or do secular states and institutions engage with the Vatican instrumentally when it serves their interests and ignore it when it does not?
• How does the Vatican exercise influence without coercive instruments, and what does this reveal about the nature of power in international politics more broadly?

Case Studies

• John Paul II and the diplomacy of the Cold War: Poland, Solidarity, and the limits of what moral authority alone could achieve
• Papal apostolic journeys as instruments of public and bilateral diplomacy: patterns, purposes, and political effects

Seminar Exercise

• Normative power analysis: students assess a specified papal document or public intervention — an encyclical, an address to a multilateral body, or a bilateral diplomatic statement — evaluating the normative claims advanced, the political context in which they were made, the intended audience, and the evidence available for assessing whether the intervention had measurable effects on international discourse or state behaviour.

Analytical Focus

• Evaluating soft power and normative theory as frameworks for religious diplomacy; connecting theological authority to diplomatic practice; assessing the conditions under which normative claims translate into political influence

Week 4 — What role does the Vatican play in conflict mediation and peace diplomacy?

Conflict mediation is the dimension of Vatican diplomacy that has attracted the most consistent scholarly and policy attention, and for good reason: the Holy See has been involved as a mediating or facilitative actor in some of the most consequential diplomatic episodes of the last century, from the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile to the normalisation of relations between the United States and Cuba. The Vatican’s claim to mediatory standing rests on a distinctive combination of attributes: perceived political neutrality derived from its lack of territorial ambition and economic interest in most conflict contexts; moral credibility rooted in its humanitarian and religious mission; a transnational presence that allows it to maintain confidential communication channels with parties who cannot publicly negotiate; and a long institutional memory of diplomatic patience that allows it to sustain engagement across timescales that exhaust conventional diplomatic actors. This week examines Vatican mediation analytically, applying mediation theory to the historical record and asking where the Vatican’s distinctive attributes genuinely enhance mediation effectiveness and where they introduce their own limitations.

Key Themes

• Mediation theory: types, conditions for success, and the role of third-party attributes
• Preventive diplomacy and the Vatican’s quiet diplomacy tradition
• Neutrality and credibility: the conditions under which religious actors gain and lose mediatory standing
• Religious actors in peace processes: comparative analysis across faith traditions
• The institutional infrastructure of Vatican mediation: the Secretariat of State, papal nuncios, and personal envoys

Core Debates

• Does the Vatican’s religious neutrality genuinely enhance its mediation effectiveness, or does its doctrinal commitment to specific outcomes on contested moral and political questions undermine the impartiality that effective mediation requires?
• Can the Vatican remain politically neutral in modern conflicts where its own institutional interests — in religious freedom, the protection of Christians, or the maintenance of concordat relationships — are implicated?

Case Studies

• The Beagle Channel mediation, 1978 to 1984: Cardinal Samorè, the mechanism of papal intervention, and the conditions that made it successful
• The Cuba-United States rapprochement, 2014 to 2015: the Holy See’s facilitative role, the limits of public knowledge, and the analytical challenge of evaluating secret diplomacy

Seminar Exercise

• Mediation case analysis: students apply mediation theory to a specified Vatican diplomatic intervention, assessing the Holy See’s entry into the process, the instruments it deployed, the role of its religious and institutional attributes in shaping the outcome, and the degree to which the case supports or complicates the theoretical expectations of the mediation literature.

Analytical Focus

• Applying mediation theory to religious diplomacy; evaluating the conditions under which Vatican mediation succeeds and where its distinctive attributes become constraints; connecting the theory of third-party intervention to the empirical record of papal peace diplomacy

Week 5 — How does the Holy See operate within multilateral institutions?

The Holy See’s presence in multilateral institutions is one of the most analytically distinctive features of its international standing. As a permanent observer at the United Nations — a status achieved in 1964 and significantly upgraded in 2004 — it participates in General Assembly debates, contributes to committee deliberations, and engages in international conferences without holding full member state status. This position allows it to engage consistently in the formation of international norms while remaining insulated from the voting obligations and political commitments that full membership entails. The Holy See has used this platform to shape international debate on a remarkable range of issues: population and development at Cairo in 1994, the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995, the Rome Statute negotiations, and successive summits on climate, migration, and sustainable development. Its interventions are not always welcomed by states that regard its positions on reproductive rights, gender, and family as obstacles to international norm convergence. This week examines the Holy See’s multilateral presence as a form of norm-shaping diplomacy, asking how it works, what it has achieved, and where it has encountered its most significant political resistance.

Key Themes

• The Holy See’s legal personality and permanent observer status at the United Nations: history, scope, and political significance
• Observer diplomacy as a form of normative engagement: advantages, constraints, and strategic use
• The Holy See’s positions in international norm production: development, population, gender, and the politics of consensus documents
• Concordat diplomacy as a bilateral complement to multilateral engagement
• The Vatican’s engagement with specialised UN agencies: UNESCO, WHO, FAO, and others

Core Debates

• Should the Holy See possess diplomatic standing in international institutions, given that it represents a religious community rather than a state, and given the secular foundations of the international institutional order?
• How does the Vatican shape international norm production, and is its influence in this domain best understood as a form of soft power, norm entrepreneurship, or simply effective political lobbying in a multilateral forum?

Case Studies

• The Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, 1994: the Holy See’s alliance-building against the draft programme of action and its long-term effects on international development discourse
• Holy See participation in the Rome Statute negotiations: engagement with the foundations of international criminal justice and the limits of Vatican endorsement

Seminar Exercise

• Multilateral diplomacy exercise: students are assigned the role of Holy See delegation members preparing for a specified UN conference or committee session, researching the relevant Vatican positions, identifying the states most likely to support or oppose those positions, and constructing a diplomatic strategy for advancing the Holy See’s normative objectives within the constraints of observer status.

Analytical Focus

• Observer diplomacy as a form of international influence; connecting multilateral engagement to norm-shaping outcomes; evaluating the Holy See’s multilateral presence as a window into the relationship between institutional standing, normative authority, and political effectiveness in international institutions

Week 6 — Can religion contribute to international peacebuilding?

The Sant’Egidio Community’s mediation of the General Peace Agreement in Mozambique in 1992 is the most frequently cited example of a faith-based non-state actor achieving what trained professional diplomats and international organisations had failed to deliver across a decade of civil war. It is a remarkable case, and it has generated a substantial literature on whether religious actors bring distinctive capacities to peacebuilding and conflict transformation that secular mediators lack. This week examines that literature critically, placing the Sant’Egidio example alongside a broader comparative analysis of religious diplomacy and faith-based peacebuilding, including the Vatican’s own engagement with interreligious dialogue as a dimension of its peace diplomacy. The question of whether religion is a resource for peacebuilding or a driver of conflict — and whether the same religious tradition can be both simultaneously in different contexts — is an analytical question the course engages with sustained empirical attention rather than normative commitment.

Key Themes

• Faith-based diplomacy: what distinguishes it from secular mediation and what the distinction actually means in practice
• Interreligious dialogue as a dimension of Vatican diplomacy: the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and its institutional logic
• Sant’Egidio as a model: community-based religious diplomacy and its relationship to the Holy See
• Humanitarian mediation and the Catholic Church’s institutional presence in conflict zones
• Reconciliation, post-conflict governance, and the contribution of religious institutions to transitional justice

Core Debates

• What genuinely distinguishes religious diplomacy from secular mediation — shared faith, institutional presence, transnational networks, moral language, or something else — and does that distinction translate into superior outcomes?
• Are faith-based actors effective in conflict transformation, or does the evidence suggest that their successes are better explained by factors — patience, impartiality, resources — that are not inherently religious?

Case Studies

• Sant’Egidio and the Mozambique peace process, 1990 to 1992: the mechanism, the conditions, and the analytical lessons
• Interfaith initiatives in post-conflict contexts: the work of religious actors in Bosnia, Rwanda, and South Sudan, and what comparative analysis reveals about the conditions for success

Seminar Exercise

• Comparative peacebuilding analysis: students evaluate two specified cases of religious actor involvement in peacebuilding or conflict mediation — one Vatican-affiliated and one from a different faith tradition or faith-based organisation — assessing the role played by religious attributes in each, the outcomes achieved, and the conclusions that can be drawn for the broader question of what religion contributes to international peacebuilding.

Analytical Focus

• Faith-based diplomacy analysis; evaluating the comparative evidence for religious actors in peacebuilding; connecting interreligious dialogue to the Vatican’s broader diplomatic strategy

Primary Source Analysis due at the end of this week.

Week 7 — Why has migration become central to Vatican diplomacy?

Pope Francis’s injunction to “welcome, protect, promote and integrate” migrants and refugees is the most prominent contemporary expression of a Catholic social teaching on migration whose roots extend through the twentieth-century magisterium. For the Vatican, migration is not primarily a security or economic management problem: it is a question of human dignity that generates obligations binding on states regardless of their political calculations about borders, sovereignty, and social cohesion. This position places the Holy See in sustained tension with most European governments and with the political currents that have shaped Western migration policy since 2015. The Vatican’s migration diplomacy operates on multiple levels simultaneously: public advocacy through papal statements and addresses to international bodies; bilateral pressure on state governments through nunciatures and concordat relationships; humanitarian engagement through Caritas and other Catholic organisations; and quiet diplomacy in specific crisis contexts. This week examines migration as a case study in how the Vatican translates doctrinal commitments into diplomatic practice, asking how far moral advocacy can influence governance outcomes in a domain where state sovereignty interests are intensely defended.

Key Themes

• Catholic social teaching on migration: Pacem in Terris, Exsul Familia, and the contemporary magisterium
• The Mediterranean migration crisis and the Holy See’s diplomatic and humanitarian response
• Vatican advocacy in multilateral migration governance: the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration
• The tension between universal humanitarian claims and state sovereignty in migration governance
• Caritas Internationalis and Catholic humanitarian organisations as instruments of Vatican migration diplomacy

Core Debates

• How does the Vatican balance its commitment to the universal dignity of migrants with the legitimate authority of states to control their borders, and does the pastoral-diplomatic language it uses resolve or merely defer that tension?
• Can moral advocacy actually influence migration governance, or does the evidence suggest that Vatican positions are acknowledged symbolically while states pursue their interests unencumbered?

Case Studies

• Mediterranean migration and papal intervention: from Lampedusa to Lesbos and the political reception of papal advocacy in European capitals
• The Global Compact on Migration negotiations: Holy See engagement, the positions advanced, and the outcome

Seminar Exercise

• Advocacy strategy analysis: students assess the Vatican’s diplomatic and public advocacy strategy on migration in a specified regional or multilateral context, evaluating the instruments deployed, the political reception among target states, the role of Catholic humanitarian organisations, and the evidence for whether Vatican intervention shifted the terms of debate or the substance of policy.

Analytical Focus

• Migration governance as a test case for normative diplomacy; connecting Catholic social teaching to diplomatic practice; evaluating the conditions under which moral advocacy influences state behaviour on questions where sovereignty interests are strongly held

Simulation role assignments and instructions distributed this week.

Week 8 — How has the Vatican entered global climate governance?

The publication of Laudato Si’ in 2015 — the encyclical in which Pope Francis addressed the ecological crisis as a moral, spiritual, and political emergency — was a significant intervention in global climate governance precisely because it reframed the terms of the debate. Where most climate advocacy addresses the problem primarily as a scientific, economic, and policy challenge, Laudato Si’ situated it within a comprehensive moral framework: as an expression of the throwaway culture that treats both human beings and the natural world as expendable, and as a problem of distributive justice between the Global North and the peoples of the developing world who bear the greatest consequences of warming they did little to cause. Whether or not this reframing had measurable effects on the Paris Agreement negotiations later that year — a claim that circulates widely but deserves careful empirical scrutiny — it established the Vatican as a distinctive voice in climate diplomacy: one whose authority derives not from scientific expertise or economic interest but from the moral weight it carries among Catholic communities and political leaders across the world. This week examines Vatican climate diplomacy as a case study in how religious normative authority engages with a domain that might seem, on its surface, entirely secular and technocratic.

Key Themes

• Laudato Si’ and its sequel Laudate Deum: content, theological framework, and diplomatic deployment
• Vatican participation in COP negotiations: delegation, statements, and coalition-building
• Ecological justice and the Global South: how the Vatican’s climate diplomacy aligns with developing country positions
• The relationship between environmental ethics and Catholic social teaching
• Secular reception of religious climate advocacy: political leaders, NGOs, and scientific institutions

Core Debates

• Can religious actors genuinely shape climate governance, or does Laudato Si’ illustrate the limits of moral authority in a domain driven by economic interests, technological trajectories, and state power?
• Is climate diplomacy becoming a moral as well as a political question, and if so, does this shift advantage or disadvantage actors like the Vatican whose influence is grounded in ethical rather than material claims?

Case Studies

• Laudato Si’ and the Paris Agreement, 2015: assessing the evidence for Vatican influence on negotiating positions and the reception of the encyclical among Catholic heads of state
• Vatican participation at COP26 and COP28: delegation activity, public statements, and engagement with the loss and damage debate

Seminar Exercise

• Climate diplomacy evaluation: students conduct a rigorous assessment of the Holy See’s influence at a specified COP negotiation, examining the positions advanced, the coalitions cultivated, the reception among state delegations, and the methodological challenges of attributing specific outcomes to Vatican advocacy in a complex multilateral negotiation.

Analytical Focus

• Religious advocacy in global governance; evaluating the conditions under which moral reframing shifts the terms of international negotiation; connecting Vatican climate diplomacy to the broader question of how normative actors engage with technocratic policy domains

Final essay proposal (one page) due at the end of this week.

Week 9 — How does the Vatican navigate relations with major powers?

The Holy See’s bilateral relationships with the world’s major powers present the most direct test of how it manages the tension between its universal moral claims and the geopolitical realities it must navigate. Relations with the United States have been institutionally embedded since the full restoration of diplomatic relations in 1984, but they are complicated by the deep divisions within American Catholicism on questions of politics, social teaching, and the relationship between religious identity and partisan allegiance. Relations with China have been defined for decades by the contest over who controls episcopal appointments — a question that is simultaneously theological, institutional, and geopolitical — and the 2018 provisional agreement with Beijing on that question has remained deeply controversial within and beyond the Church. Relations with Russia, never straightforward, have been tested severely by the invasion of Ukraine, placing the Vatican’s aspiration to serve as a channel of mediation in tension with the moral imperative to name and respond to an act of aggression against a sovereign state. This week examines these relationships analytically, asking how the Vatican manages competing demands and what its handling of major power relationships reveals about the character of its diplomacy.

Key Themes

• Vatican-United States relations: history, institutional structure, and the politics of Catholic identity in American public life
• Vatican-China relations: episcopal appointments, the underground Church, and the 2018 provisional agreement
• Vatican diplomacy during the Ukraine war: mediation aspirations, humanitarian engagement, and the limits of neutrality in a conflict with clear moral dimensions
• Religious freedom as a dimension of major power diplomacy: the Vatican’s advocacy and its reception
• Geopolitical pragmatism and moral consistency: how the Vatican makes and defends trade-offs

Core Debates

• Does Vatican diplomacy with major powers prioritise moral consistency — speaking clearly on human rights, religious freedom, and the laws of war — or does it subordinate those commitments to strategic pragmatism in the pursuit of access and influence?
• How does the Holy See balance its universal mission with the specific interests of Catholic communities in states where those communities are minority populations dependent on the political goodwill of authoritarian governments?

Case Studies

• The Vatican-China provisional agreement on episcopal appointments, 2018: the terms, the controversy within the Church, the geopolitical logic, and the assessment of its effects after successive renewals
• Vatican diplomacy during the war in Ukraine: the offer of mediation, the humanitarian corridor proposals, and the political reception of papal statements on the conflict

Seminar Exercise

• Major power diplomacy analysis: students develop an analytical assessment of the Vatican’s diplomatic strategy towards a specified major power, evaluating the instruments deployed, the normative and strategic trade-offs involved, the consistency of the approach with the Vatican’s stated principles, and the evidence for what the relationship has actually delivered for either party.

Analytical Focus

• Major power diplomacy as a test of normative consistency versus strategic pragmatism; evaluating the Vatican’s management of competing demands; connecting bilateral relationship analysis to the broader question of what kind of actor the Holy See is and what it is ultimately trying to achieve

Strategic Diplomatic Brief due at the end of this week.

Week 10 — Can the Vatican influence international human rights discourse?

Catholic social teaching offers one of the most developed and historically deep traditions of normative reflection on the rights and dignity of human beings in the modern political tradition. Yet the Vatican’s relationship with the international human rights regime is far from straightforward. On questions of civil and political rights, freedom of conscience, religious liberty, and the protection of civilian life, the Holy See has often been among the most consistent voices in international fora. On questions of reproductive rights, the legal recognition of same-sex relationships, and aspects of gender equality as understood in progressive human rights discourse, the Vatican has positioned itself in direct opposition to the evolving consensus in many international institutions, often in coalition with states whose broader human rights records it would otherwise criticise. This pattern of selective engagement has generated both admiration and sharp criticism, and it raises fundamental analytical questions about whether the Vatican is best understood as a defender of a distinctive and coherent human rights vision or as a selective participant whose engagement reflects the internal logic of Catholic doctrine rather than a commitment to the international human rights project as a whole.

Key Themes

• Catholic social teaching and the foundations of human dignity: Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si’
• Religious freedom as the Vatican’s first human rights priority: history, theology, and diplomatic deployment
• Bioethics and international governance: the Vatican’s positions on reproductive rights, end-of-life questions, and the politics of consensus documents
• Universalism and cultural contestation in human rights: the Vatican’s alliances with developing country governments and other religious actors
• The Holy See’s engagement with the UN Human Rights Council and treaty body processes

Core Debates

• Is the Vatican a defender or a selective critic of the liberal international human rights framework, and does the distinction matter analytically if the Vatican’s normative claims are grounded in a coherent alternative rather than simple opposition?
• How does the Holy See shape debates concerning ethics and international law in domains where its positions are contested by the majority of liberal democracies, and what does its success or failure in those debates reveal about the nature of norm production in international institutions?

Case Studies

• Vatican engagement in United Nations human rights debates: the politics of consensus documents on gender, family, and reproductive health at major international conferences
• Religious freedom diplomacy: the Vatican’s advocacy for persecuted Christian communities and its relationship to broader human rights advocacy frameworks

Seminar Exercise

• Vatican mediation simulation (Part One): students represent assigned parties — the Holy See, state delegations, civil society actors, and international organisations — in a structured multilateral mediation exercise concerning a specified humanitarian or normative dispute in which the Vatican’s distinctive position creates both opportunities and tensions, advancing position papers and engaging with the institutional and normative constraints that shape Vatican diplomatic behaviour.

Analytical Focus

• Human rights analysis applied to a religious actor with a distinctive normative framework; evaluating the consistency and coherence of Vatican human rights engagement; connecting doctrinal foundations to diplomatic strategy in contested international norm domains

Week 11 — Is Vatican diplomacy challenged by secularisation and geopolitical fragmentation?

The structural environment in which Vatican diplomacy operates has changed significantly across the course of the twenty-first century, and not entirely in the Vatican’s favour. Secularisation in Western Europe and North America — the regions where Catholic populations have historically been most politically significant — has reduced the domestic political leverage that Catholic social teaching commands in democratic states. The liberal international order in which Vatican multilateral diplomacy found its institutional home is under sustained pressure from great power competition, democratic backsliding, and the rise of nationalist and sovereigntist politics across multiple world regions. Digital communications have disrupted the Vatican’s control over the framing and dissemination of its messages, creating both new platforms for papal communication and new vulnerabilities to distortion, misrepresentation, and internal Catholic controversy conducted in public. And the growing weight of the Global South within global Catholicism — Africa and Latin America now contain the majority of practising Catholics — is beginning to reshape the internal politics of the Church in ways whose diplomatic implications are still unfolding. This week examines these structural challenges to Vatican diplomatic capacity, asking how the Holy See is adapting and where its adaptation has been most and least successful.

Key Themes

• Secularisation and post-secular politics: the changing landscape of religious influence in liberal democracies
• The crisis of the liberal international order and its implications for a normative diplomatic actor
• Digital diplomacy and the Vatican: papal social media presence, the opportunities and risks of direct public communication, and the management of internal Church controversy in the digital space
• The Global South and the shifting centre of global Catholicism: Africa, Latin America, and the internal politics of a genuinely global Church
• Institutional adaptation: how the Holy See is adjusting its diplomatic instruments to a changed geopolitical environment

Core Debates

• Can religious diplomacy remain politically influential in increasingly secular societies, or is the Vatican’s normative authority in liberal democracies declining in ways that its expanding presence in the Global South cannot fully compensate?
• How does global geopolitical fragmentation affect a normative diplomatic actor whose influence depends on the existence of shared international institutions and a minimally functional multilateral order?

Case Studies

• Papal digital communication strategy: the Vatican’s use of social media, the reception of papal statements in polarised political environments, and the management of internal theological controversies in public
• The African Catholic Church and Vatican diplomacy: how the growing weight of African Catholicism is beginning to shape the Holy See’s positions on contested social and ethical questions

Seminar Exercise

• Vatican mediation simulation (Part Two) and reflective presentation: students continue the simulation from Week 10, reaching or failing to reach a negotiated outcome, then deliver individual five-minute reflective presentations on their experience of representing Vatican diplomatic interests, identifying what the simulation revealed about the structural constraints and distinctive capacities of Holy See diplomacy in practice.

Analytical Focus

• Structural challenge analysis applied to a normative diplomatic actor; evaluating the resilience and adaptability of Vatican diplomacy under conditions of secularisation and geopolitical fragmentation; connecting internal Church dynamics to external diplomatic capacity

Week 12 — What is the future of Vatican diplomacy in global governance?

Strategic forecasting is a discipline of structured uncertainty. It cannot predict the future, but it can identify the forces most likely to shape it, map the scenarios in which different combinations of those forces produce divergent outcomes, and clarify the choices that make some futures more or less probable. For Vatican diplomacy, the horizon of the mid-twenty-first century presents a genuinely open set of possibilities. A Church whose centre of gravity has shifted decisively to Africa and the Global South will speak with different emphases and different internal political dynamics than the European-centred Church that shaped the diplomatic tradition examined across this course. Artificial intelligence raises ethical questions — about human dignity, labour, autonomous weapons, algorithmic decision-making, and the nature of personhood — on which Catholic social teaching has developed considered positions and on which the Vatican’s voice in international governance debates may prove more rather than less consequential as states and institutions struggle to establish normative frameworks for technologies moving faster than any existing governance architecture. The question of whether Vatican diplomacy will remain a significant force in global governance across the coming decades, and on what terms, is the question the course closes with — returning to the foundational puzzle it opened with, but armed with the analytical tools developed across twelve weeks of sustained inquiry.

Key Themes

• Artificial intelligence, human dignity, and Vatican engagement in technology ethics governance
• The shifting global geography of Catholicism and its implications for Vatican diplomacy and internal Church politics
• Climate, migration, and the long-term agenda of Vatican normative advocacy in global governance
• The future of multilateralism and what a more fragmented international order means for a normative actor dependent on international institutions
• Succession, continuity, and change: how the choice of future pontiffs shapes the direction of Vatican diplomacy

Core Debates

• Will the Vatican’s geopolitical influence increase or decline across the twenty-first century, and what are the decisive variables that will determine the answer?
• Can religious diplomacy shape future global governance frameworks on emerging issues — artificial intelligence, biotechnology, digital rights — where the ethical stakes are high but the normative frameworks remain underdeveloped?

Case Studies

• Vatican initiatives on artificial intelligence ethics: the Rome Call for AI Ethics, engagement with technology governance institutions, and the positioning of Catholic social teaching in debates about autonomous systems and algorithmic decision-making
• Expanding diplomatic engagement with the Global South: African partnerships, Latin American relationships, and the diplomatic implications of demographic Catholicism

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic futures workshop: students work in teams to construct and present two contrasting scenarios for Vatican diplomacy in 2050, specifying the key variables, driving forces, and strategic implications of each, then subject each other’s scenarios to critical scrutiny in open seminar discussion, drawing explicitly on the theoretical frameworks, historical cases, and analytical tools developed across the course.

Analytical Focus

• Strategic forecasting methodology applied to a non-state normative actor; scenario construction; synthesising the theoretical, historical, and analytical frameworks developed across the course and applying them to questions about the long-term future of religious diplomacy in an international order whose direction remains genuinely contested

Final Research Essay due in Week 13.

*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.