The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality​

The essays in this book cover a fast-paced 150 years of Vatican diplomacy, starting from the fall of the Papal States in 1870 to the present day. They trace the transformation of the Vatican from a state like any other to an entity uniquely providing spiritual and moral sustenance in world affairs. In particular, the book details the Holy See’s use of neutrality as a tool and the principal statecraft in its diplomatic portmanteau. This concept of “permanent neutrality,” as codified in the Lateran Treaties of 1929, is a central concept adding to the Vatican’s uniqueness and, as a result, the analysis of its policies does not easily fit within standard international relations or foreign policy scholarship. These essays consider in detail the Vatican’s history with “permanent neutrality” and its application in diplomacy toward delicate situations as, for instance, vis a vis Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, but also in the international relations of the Cold War in debates about nuclear non-proliferation, or outreach toward the third world, including Cuba and Venezuela. The book also considers the ineluctable tension between pastoral teachings and realpolitik, as the church faces a reckoning with its history.​

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Italy recognized the Vatican City as an independent state under the sover- eignty of the Holy See in the Lateran Treaty signed February 11, 1929. This political treaty (sometimes called the Treaty of Conciliation) included a separately signed financial convention regarding financial compensation that was appended to the Conciliation Treaty as Annex 4. At the same time, Italy and the Holy See signed a Concordat regarding their religious relations. All these are referred to as the Lateran Pact or Pacts (and variously as consisting of two or more documents. Read more….

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the fundamental elements of Vatican diplomacy between 1870 and 1929 and, in particular, to consider how far that diplomacy adhered to policies of neutrality and impartiality. Before Consalvi declared papal neutrality in 1821, though the pope was the Vicar of Christ, and therefore logically “The Prince of Peace,” neither neutrality nor impartiality characterized the Holy See’s international role. Since the popes’ territorial sovereignty—the so-called Temporal Power—consisted of a medium-sized state in Central Italy, they were anxious to defend, consolidate and even extend their territory. Consequently, military alliances were formed with Italian and other European states, and in the sixteenth century, one pope, Julius II, actually led his army into battle. While these alliances were chiefly a tactical response to the political situation in the Italian peninsula-like the 1508 League of Cambrai with France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain against Venice—they could also be more “theological” as in the alliances against Protestantism during the Thirty Years War, and against the Muslim assault upon Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in these cases, neutrality was not an option for the papacy.

More than nine decades ago, on February 11, 1929, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, secretary of state of Pius XI, and Benito Mussolini, prime minister of Italy, signed two agreements in the Lateran Palace. Gasparri acted on behalf of Pope Pius XI. Mussolini represented King Vittorio Emmanuele III, the King of Italy. The two agreements—the Lateran Treaty and a Concordat between Italy and the Holy See (collectively referred to as The Lateran Pacts)— resolved a painful situation that began in 1870, when the Italian unification process’s final steps stripped the pope of the territory of the Papal States. In subsequent magisterial documents, mostly encyclicals, Pius IX and his successors lamented the Papal States’ loss and labeled the occupation of the Papal States to be in opposition with Divine Providence.

On September 20, 1870, with the entry of the army of the Italian Kingdom into the city of Rome, the defeat of the Papal State was completed. For centuries, Rome had been the inseparable center of power of the Chair of Saint Peter. Therefore, when the Kingdom of Italy proclaimed Rome its capital city the following year, it marked the beginning of a bitter political, diplomatic, and legal dispute between the Italian State and the Holy See. History remembers this issue as the “Roman Question.”

Thanks to the Lateran Treaty, Italy finally recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See and its jurisdiction over Vatican City. This ended decades of dispute between successive popes and the leaders of the Italian state, and for the first time, the Kingdom of Italy renounced two principles of its liberal vision of the state: the idea of religion as a private matter and the exclusive sovereignty of the state. Importantly, the treaty also was an agreement signed with an authoritarian government with totalitarian ambitions. The presence of the Vatican City State in the capital of the Kingdom, as well as the privileges recognized to the Catholic Church through the concordat and the reality of the dictatorship put to the test the determination of the Vatican to maintain a position of neutrality in the international conflicts of fascist Italy.

On the death of Pope Pius XI in 1939, Manuel L. Quezon wrote a letter of condolence on behalf of the Philippine nation, which he signed as “President of the Philippines.” Three days later, he received a warm response from the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli—soon to be Pope Pius XII—thanking the “President of the Philippine Commonwealth” for his expression of sympathy. The marginal difference in Quezon’s title was a subtle nuance but characteristic of Pacelli’s sense of diplomatic etiquette. The Commonwealth was the Philippines’ civil administration, which had been governing the island’s internal matters since 1935, in preparation for independence, which the US Congress had already granted, but that awaited the end of a ten-year transitional period. A diplomat for forty years, Pacelli was keenly aware of the importance of diplomatic accuracy. The exchange with Quezon stands in stark contrast to Pacelli’s rejection of correspondence with José P. Laurel, who became the president of the Second Republic of the Philippines, 1943 through 1945. The republic was a Japanese satellite state, which was reliant on and allied with the Japanese Empire. The Holy See (HS) never recognized it.

In the encyclical Humani Generis Unitas (Unity of the Human Race), drafted in 1938 but never issued, the authors made the following statement admonishing faithful Roman Catholics not to “remain silent” in the face of racism: “the struggle for racial purity ends by being uniquely the struggle against the Jews.” By 1945, this premonition of the ultimate consequences of racism and Jew-hatred—the murder of approximately six million Jews in the Shoah—had come to pass. The shelving of this draft encyclical by Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII, 1939–1958) and the pope’s decision to remain neutral and impartial during World War II was the subject of vigorous debate both then and now.

“How many divisions does the pope have?”—Joseph Stalin’s October 1944 quip to Winston Churchill has taken on legendary status in the annals of European history. Yet, remarkably little attention has been paid to the con- cepts implicit in Stalin’s dismissal of the Catholic Church as an international actor. Key among these was the permanent neutrality of the Holy See. In Stalin’s eyes, this legal neutrality, agreed within article 24 of the 1929 Lateran Accords, amounted to a complete defanging of the modern Roman Catholic Church in the international arena.