Fifty years after the Helsinki Accords, the world is a very different place.
Just a few days after the conclave, the newly elected pope Leo XIV had to pass his first test of international politics. Some had overinterpreted remarks from Cardinal Parolin about the possibility of the Holy See serving as “facilitator” or “observer” for ending the war in Ukraine. The idea of making the Vatican the venue for peace talks between two countries in a war that has intra-Orthodox connotations was a departure from the more active role of “mediation” that some imagined or hoped for. At any rate, Vladimir Putin ignored the offer. Though Pope Leo and his top diplomats have so far managed to avoid this instrumental and cynical use of the Vatican, the U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear sites now presents a fresh challenge. “I want to just thank everybody,” Donald Trump said in a speech from the White House after the bombing. “And, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel and God bless America.” Behind him as he spoke stood his Catholic vice president, his Catholic secretary of state, and a secretary of defense who authored a book titled American Crusade.
The attempt to use the Vatican suggests something interesting about the international role of the papacy compared to the recent past. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of 1975’s Helsinki Accords, which were signed in the capital of Finland by thirty-five nations, including the United States, the USSR, and virtually all European countries. In the runup to the accords, the Holy See was fully involved—the first time it had participated in such a meeting since the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) had its roots in the superpowers’ efforts to ease tensions in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and played an important role in the strategy of détente, of easing tensions between the two blocs, beginning in the late 1960s. Among the principles affirmed by the Helsinki Accords, which in time also helped bring about the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, were respect for the rights over sovereignty; non-recourse to the use of force; peaceful settlement of disputes; inviolability of borders and territorial integrity of states; respect for human rights and human freedoms, including religious freedoms; and self-determination of peoples. In the months following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis repeatedly invoked the “spirit of Helsinki.” By the end of the year the hopes expressed by that phrase had vanished. Fifty years on, we see how much has changed—and how much we now miss something like Helsinki.
In the years of negotiations leading to the 1975 accords, European Catholic Churches (and the Vatican itself, thanks to its unique international status) inserted themselves skillfully into the multilateral dialogue of international politics to advance an ecumenical and humanitarian agenda. Today, the opposite seems to be happening, with international leaders using Pope Francis’s funeral and Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural Mass as opportunities to talk face-to-face. The image of President Trump and President Zelensky meeting in St. Peter’s Basilica before Francis’s funeral was an almost iconic portrait of the power of the Vatican as a world stage—while suggesting the current impotence of secular diplomacy and international organizations.
In 1975, Helsinki reflected a bipolar world dominated by the United States (and its Western European allies) and the Soviet Union. Today, there are other emerging powers, and Europe’s role is more marginal and uncertain. Gone is the assured protection of the United States—as Vice President J. D. Vance made clear in his February speech in Munich. (Indeed, there is a clear anti-European sentiment coming from Catholic politicians and intellectuals on the right, for whom the old continent is a counterexample not to be modeled.) Helsinki is no longer the capital city of a neutral country, with Finland having joined NATO in 2023. Germany is reunited and on the path to rearmament. The United Kingdom, which joined the European Union two years before the accords, has of course long since left it. The West as a cohesive geopolitical actor no longer exists. Even national-intelligence data is largely gathered and stored by private companies. The accords facilitated exchanges between the East and the West, opening a door that Communists in the East wanted to keep shut. Today, it’s the West (especially the United States) that seems intent on closing it, whether to stop the flow of goods or students—or priests: it’s now a lot harder to come to Europe or North America to study and minister in the Church. The norms the accords established in order to advance arms control are no longer seen as normative; even in the United States, there’s a new rhetoric of militarization used not only in relations with geopolitical rivals, but also as a tool for exerting political dominance domestically. Donald Trump’s military parade and his decision to send National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles are expressive of this.
Ecclesially, the Catholic Church brought to Helsinki what it had proclaimed at Vatican II in terms of the acceptance of democracy, religious liberty, and human rights. The openness of the Second Vatican Council to dialogue with the modern world led the Church to recognize rights that papal teaching had not been able to recognize only within the framework of natural law. (Interestingly, in a June 21 meeting with officials of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Leo XIV stressed the importance of natural law for international relations.)
The right to religious freedom is the most striking testimony to this development—and it’s one of the reasons that the declaration of Vatican II’s Dignitatis humanae is at the center of attention for the new Catholic “integralists.” In Octogesima adveniens, Paul VI accepted “legitimate plurality” and “the autonomy of the reality of politics.” Ecumenism was advancing in bilateral and multilateral dialogues, and the constraints of the Cold War were paradoxically a facilitator of some exchanges, especially between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches. In interreligious relations, it was still early to imagine the comeback of the “strong religions” (including Islam and Judaism) on the political scene, both domestically and internationally.
Today the limits of the role of the Holy See in peacemaking efforts are clear. There are very few cases in which the Vatican itself mediated between countries at war, and those few cases were geographically far from Europe and Russia. The 1984 mediation between Chile and Argentina was in part a sideshow to, and the effort to distract from, the two brutal military dictatorships in which the role of a very anti-Communist Holy See was ambivalent. More recently, the attempt at a U.S.-Cuba rapprochement during Pope Francis’s pontificate was about humanitarian issues of common interest, not stopping an all-out war. The international community generally accepts the humanitarian or peacemaking efforts of Catholic organizations (e.g. the Community of Sant’Egidio). But the international community generally does not accept the Holy See per se as a real mediator between countries at war, and especially in cases of war with significant interecclesial (Ukraine and Russia) or interreligious narratives (Israel, Palestine, and Iran). We will see whether and how the U.S.-born pope will change the role of the Vatican in peacemaking efforts.
Post–Vatican II ecumenical and interreligious dialogue had a limited effect in international relations. “Interreligious dialogue” came to describe a way of attempting to bridge political polarization and overcome political and theological barriers, useful more at the local level of spiritual dialogue than in the international arena of big-powers politics. The interaction between religion and politics at this moment presents us with a post-Enlightenment mix of exploiting religious identity for political purposes and a renewed apocalyptic desire fueled by ambivalence about civilization. It’s evident in the current rhetoric about Islam and Judaism and about the Moscow Patriarchate in post-Soviet neo-imperialist Russia; it’s evident as well in intra-Catholic conversations and among neo-fundamentalist voices in U.S. Catholicism.
Thus the Church’s work for peace faces new headwinds. The papacy currently embodies a cool-headed approach to religion and politics, in which men and women of good will and hope will prevail; by Vatican II, Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors and Leo XIII’s encyclical on the Christian constitution of states (Immortale Dei) were already part of the past. But lately there is nostalgia—especially in right-wing U.S. Catholicism—for a pre–Vatican II political theology. Leo XIV will have to deal with new attempts to influence papal teaching about the role of the Church in international affairs—and in ways that differ significantly from the era of Catholic neoconservatives: Is a holy-war mindset overtaking the tradition of just-war teaching?
The Church’s work for peace faces new headwinds.
A new role for the Holy See on the international scene was part of the reinvention of the papacy which in 1870 had lost its temporal power and the Papal States. That reinvention, which happened during the pontificate of Leo XIII, had its limits. Now Leo XIV has new opportunities. In his first month, the pope from the United States made clear that he sees a central role for Vatican diplomacy. In his June 10 speech to papal representatives, Leo said that “the diplomacy of the Holy See constitutes in its very personnel a model—certainly not perfect, but very significant—of the message it proposes, namely that of human fraternity and peace among peoples,” he said. Speaking off the cuff, he added that the ministry of pontifical representatives is “irreplaceable.”
It’s important in this context how Leo sees the role of the Secretariat of State. While Francis relegated it to the margins, Leo immediately restored it as the cornerstone not only of diplomacy but of the entire Apostolic See, designed in his time by Paul VI in his 1967 reform of the Roman Curia. In his June 5 address to the superiors and officials of the Secretariat of State, Leo said that “the history of this institution dates back, as we know, to the end of the fifteenth century. Over time, it has taken on an increasingly universal character and has grown considerably, acquiring additional tasks in response to emerging needs both within the Church and in relations with States and international organizations.… Thank you for the skills you place at the service of the Church, for your work—which almost always goes unnoticed—and for the evangelical spirit that inspires it.”
Francis’s position on war and peace was actually somewhat radical, closer to pacifism than to the stance of his predecessors. It remains to be seen what Leo the Augustinian’s posture will be. In an 2022 interview when he was bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, he articulated his view of the war in Ukraine as an act of “imperialist invasion.” Since his papal election, a rebalancing of the Vatican’s position toward the side of Ukraine has been apparent—hence the June 4 phone call between the pope and Putin, which was initiated by the Russian president.
The choice of the name of Leo surely has a lot to do with Rerum novarum, as the new pope said himself. But Leo XIII was also the pope who valued the role of the Secretariat of State as part of the reinvention of papal power in the nineteenth century, after the trauma of the Napoleonic invasions and the kidnapping of the pope. Between the end of Leo XIII’s pontificate and Vatican II, the same amount of time had elapsed as between Vatican II and today. The Helsinki Accords of fifty years ago were the product of a specific theological and political season that seems very distant now. The principles for the engagement of the Holy See in international affairs have not changed. There is even more need for that engagement today. But context is everything: the current global environment calls into question many theological and political doctrines taken for granted in the early post–Vatican II era of the Helsinki Accords.
Massimo Faggioli is professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. His most recent book is “Theology and Catholic Higher Education: Beyond Our Identity Crisis” (Orbis Books). Follow him on social media @MassimoFaggioli.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
