On April 26, 2025, in Saint Peter’s Square, more than two hundred thousand people attended the funeral of Francis. A hundred and seventy national delegations. Heads of state and prime ministers from around the world. Trump and Biden seated four rows apart. Zelensky and Trump met on the margins of the ceremony and held what the White House described as a “very productive discussion,” their first exchange since the disastrous meeting in Washington in February. In death, Francis achieved what he had not managed in life: getting the parties to a conflict he had tried to mediate for three years to sit in the same room.
No other funeral in the world produces that effect. No other institution has the ability to convene geopolitical adversaries under one roof, suspend rhetorical hostilities for a few hours, and create a space where a handshake is possible. The United Nations cannot do it; it is a mere bureaucracy where actors repeat known positions before cameras. No individual state can do it, because every state has interests that disqualify it as a neutral mediator. The Holy See can, and it can precisely because of what it is: an institution with no army, no relevant economy, no significant territory, but with something no other actor in the international system possesses, which is moral authority recognised by one point four billion Catholics and respected, however grudgingly, by virtually everyone else.
A Diplomacy Two Thousand Years Old
The Holy See is the oldest institution, and oldest diplomatic actor, in the world. It maintains diplomatic relations with more than a hundred and eighty countries and operates a network of apostolic nuncios that functions as a parallel foreign service, often with access to interlocutors conventional diplomats cannot reach. The nuncio in a crisis-ridden African country speaks with the president and with the local bishop, with the guerrilla commander and with the mother superior of the convent that runs the only hospital in the area. That capillarity is unique.
Vatican diplomacy does not operate like that of a conventional state because the Holy See is not a conventional state. It has no territorial interests, does not compete for resources, does not seek commercial advantages. What it seeks, and this is important to understand without cynicism, is to create conditions for peace and to protect the religious freedom of Catholic communities around the world. Those two objectives, which may sound naive in the language of realpolitik, give the Vatican a freedom of manoeuvre other actors do not have. It can talk to everyone because it threatens no one. It can mediate because it has nothing territorial to gain. Material weakness is, paradoxically, the source of its diplomatic strength.
There is a tradition in Vatican diplomacy that goes back at least to the Congress of Vienna of 1815, where the Holy See participated actively in the reconstruction of the European order after the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, papal diplomacy intervened in conflicts in ways that secular history tends to forget. Leo XIII arbitrated the dispute between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands in 1885. Benedict XV attempted to mediate in the First World War with a peace note in 1917 that was rejected by both sides. John XXIII played a role in the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, offering a discreet channel of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev. John Paul II, whose role in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe is widely acknowledged, used Vatican diplomacy as an instrument of moral pressure against regimes that could not ignore him without cost.
This history matters because it establishes a pattern: the Vatican intervenes not when it has the power to impose solutions but when it has the credibility to facilitate conversations other actors cannot initiate.
Francis: The Diplomacy of the Gesture
Jorge Mario Bergoglio arrived at the papacy in 2013 without formal diplomatic experience but with something perhaps more useful: a political intuition sharpened in the complexities of Argentina and of the Society of Jesus, two schools that teach you to navigate ambiguity like few others. Francis transformed Vatican diplomacy in ways his predecessors had not attempted, taking it from the salon to the public square, from the communiqué to the gesture.
The most famous gesture came in South Sudan. In April 2019, during a retreat at the Vatican with the warring leaders of the Sudanese civil war, Francis, struggling with his chronic leg problems, knelt and kissed the feet of President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, imploring them to keep the peace. The image went around the world. It was an act of humility no other world leader could have performed without looking ridiculous, and which Francis carried out with the natural authority of someone who represents a two-thousand-year tradition. It did not resolve the South Sudanese civil war, which continues in various forms. But it created a moment of moral pressure that no diplomatic communiqué could have produced.
Francis’s most concrete diplomatic achievement was the normalisation of relations between Cuba and the United States in 2014. The Vatican facilitated eighteen months of secret negotiations between Washington and Havana, providing a neutral space and a trusted intermediary for both sides. Francis wrote personal letters to Obama and Raúl Castro urging them to resolve the question of political prisoners and to move towards re-establishing diplomatic relations. In December 2014, both governments simultaneously announced the normalisation. Obama publicly acknowledged the Pope’s role. It was the most successful Vatican mediation since John Paul II’s intervention in the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile in 1978.
In Colombia, when peace negotiations between the Santos government and the FARC were on the verge of collapse in 2016, partly because President Santos and former president Uribe were at odds, Francis summoned both to Rome and used his moral authority to press them towards an agreement. Six months later, the peace accords were signed. Francis visited Colombia three months after that. He was not the only factor, nor even the principal one, but he was a factor nobody else could have provided.
With Venezuela, the intervention was less successful but equally revealing. The Vatican facilitated a dialogue between the Maduro government and the opposition in 2016 that produced no concrete results, largely because Maduro used the negotiations as a stalling tactic while consolidating power. Critics argued the Vatican mediation was naive. Perhaps. But the alternative, the total absence of any channel for dialogue, was not better.
Ukraine: The Hardest Case
The war in Ukraine was the greatest diplomatic challenge of Francis’s pontificate, and also his greatest frustration. The Pope attempted to position himself as a mediator from the first day of the Russian invasion in February 2022, breaking protocol by appearing personally at the Russian embassy to the Holy See. But the conditions for mediation never materialised, because neither side was willing to concede what was necessary for a peace process to make sense.
Francis maintained a position that drew criticism from all sides, which, in Vatican diplomacy, is usually a sign that something is being done right. He refused to condemn Russia by name in the terms Ukraine and the West demanded, because he understood that doing so would destroy any possibility of mediation. If the Pope condemns one party, he loses the ability to speak with that party. This is elementary diplomacy, but it was interpreted by many as complicity or indifference.
At the same time, Francis deployed intense diplomatic activity behind the scenes. In May 2023 he appointed Cardinal Matteo Zuppi as special envoy for peace, a mission that took him to Kyiv, Moscow, Washington, and Beijing. Zuppi focused on two concrete humanitarian objectives: the repatriation of prisoners of war and, crucially, the return of the thousands of Ukrainian children deported to Russia. In June 2024, Russia released ten prisoners, including two priests, and Zelensky publicly acknowledged the Vatican’s intervention.
Francis’s most controversial comment on Ukraine was his March 2024 statement suggesting Ukraine should have “the courage of the white flag” and negotiate. The reaction was furious. Kyiv summoned the papal nuncio. European leaders criticised the Pope. The Vatican clarified that Francis was referring to both parties laying down their arms, not to a unilateral Ukrainian surrender. But the damage was done.
Yet that statement deserves a more careful reading. Francis was not saying Ukraine should accept the Russian conquest. He was saying something many people thought but nobody in a position of power dared say aloud: that the war had no viable military solution for either side, that the indefinite continuation of the conflict was producing suffering disproportionate to any achievable political objective, and that negotiation is not surrender but realism. At bottom, it was a Clausewitzian argument: if war is the continuation of politics, and politics cannot achieve its objectives by military means, then you must return to politics. Francis said it clumsily. But he was not wrong.
The fact that Francis’s own funeral became the setting for the meeting between Trump and Zelensky was, perhaps, the most eloquent posthumous vindication of his diplomacy. He did not achieve peace in Ukraine. But he kept open a channel others had closed, and in the end, that channel was what allowed two opposing leaders to sit down and talk.
The Logic of Soft Power
Joseph Nye coined the concept of soft power to describe an actor’s ability to influence others not through coercion or economic incentives but through attraction. The Vatican is probably the purest example of soft power in the international system.
It has no hard power in any relevant sense. The Swiss Guard is a ceremonial relic. The Vatican’s budget is insignificant in geopolitical terms. Its territory covers forty-four hectares. But the Holy See has something no army can buy: a global network of spiritual loyalties, an institutional tradition spanning two millennia, and the ability to speak in a register, the moral one, that states cannot use without sounding hypocritical.
When Francis spoke of peace, he did not speak as a diplomat calculating interests. He spoke as the representative of a tradition that considers peace a moral imperative, not a balance of forces. This can seem naive, and sometimes it is. But it also has an efficacy that pure realism does not reach, because it touches a dimension of human experience that conventional diplomacy ignores. Leaders can reject pressure from another state. They find it harder to reject the pressure of their own conscience, especially when that pressure is articulated by an institution that claims authority over conscience itself.
There is a temptation, common in secular analysis, to treat the Vatican as a minor actor or a picturesque relic. It is a mistake. The Holy See has access to information other actors do not, through its network of nuncios and local Catholic communities in virtually every country on earth. It has a capacity for mediation other actors do not, because its neutrality is more credible. And it has an institutional continuity no government can match: the Holy See thinks in decades and centuries, not in electoral cycles. When the Vatican negotiated with China the agreement on the appointment of bishops in 2018, critics accused it of conceding too much. The Vatican responded, rightly, that its time horizon is different. The relationship with China is not resolved in one pontificate. It is built over generations.
Leo XIV and the Future
With the death of Francis on April 21, 2025, and the election of Leo XIV on May 8, Vatican diplomacy enters a new phase. The new Pope, Robert Francis Prevost, an American, has signalled that the Vatican is willing to serve as a venue for negotiations on the conflict in Ukraine. Cardinal Parolin, who remains as Secretary of State and was the operational architect of much of Francis’s diplomacy, ensures continuity.
But beyond the moment, what matters is the structure. The Vatican as a diplomatic actor does not depend on any particular Pope, though an exceptional Pope like Francis enormously amplifies its effectiveness. It depends on an institutional network, a tradition of mediation, and a source of legitimacy, the faith of more than a billion people, that has no secular equivalent.
In a world where multilateral institutions are losing credibility at an alarming rate, where the United Nations is irrelevant in the conflicts that matter most, where diplomacy has in many cases been reduced to press releases and economic sanctions, the existence of an actor that operates outside the logic of conventional power is not an anachronism. It is a necessity.
One can be sceptical about the efficacy of Vatican diplomacy in specific cases. Cuba was normalised and then complicated again. Venezuela remains under Maduro. Peace in South Sudan did not hold. Ukraine is still at war. But the efficacy of mediation is not measured only by immediate results. It is measured by the preservation of channels of communication when all others close, by the capacity to sustain conversations that would otherwise not exist, by the willingness to talk to every party when the moral consensus demands you speak to only one.
Francis understood something the secular world has difficulty accepting: that peace is not a product of the balance of power, even though the balance of power is necessary to sustain it. Peace is also, and perhaps fundamentally, an act of moral will. And there is no institution in the world better positioned to remind us of that than the Catholic Church, with its two thousand years of history, its innumerable errors, its inexhaustible capacity for renewal, and its insistence, stubborn and so often misunderstood, that the human being is more than a rational agent calculating interests.
That will not change with Leo XIV. It will not change in the twenty-first century. It has not changed in two thousand years. And that permanence, in a world that transforms at a dizzying speed, is itself a form of power.