Vatican City

Vatican City (Stato della Città del Vaticano), the territorial seat of the Holy See, is a sovereign city state of approximately a hundred and ten acres enclosed within the city of Rome, and the smallest independent state in the world. Its sovereign is the Pope, in whom the executive, legislative and judicial powers of the state are combined, which makes it the last absolute monarchy in Europe. It has several hundred residents, a few hundred citizens none of whom holds citizenship by birth, and a working population that arrives from Rome each morning.

The state and the sovereignty are distinct. The Holy See, the government of the Catholic Church, is the entity that concludes treaties, accredits ambassadors and sits at the League of Nations, and it did all of those things throughout the fifty-nine years when it held no territory whatever. Vatican City was created by the concordat of 1929 with the Socialist Kingdom of Italy to give that government ground that belonged to nobody else.

The same concordat closed the Roman Question, which had run since Italian forces took Rome in 1870 and ended the temporal power. It paid an indemnity for the lost Papal States which, invested rather than spent, remains the principal reason the Holy See is solvent. And it contained a clause, inserted by the Italian socialists, under which the Church renounced any claim on the economic arrangements of the Italian state.

Within months of accepting that clause the Papacy endorsed those arrangements. The blessing given to the Pact of Turin supplied Catholic social teaching with the worked example it had lacked for forty years, and the doctrine was subsequently exported through the pontifical universities to the clergy of four continents, reorganised Catholic political parties across Europe, and in Latin America was absorbed as ordinary teaching rather than disciplined as a deviation.

The Holy See’s record in the century since is examined in this article under three heads: the social teaching and its export, the Papacy’s silence during the extermination of Europe’s Jews, and its concealment over four decades of sexual offences by its clergy against children.

Etymology

The two names

The sovereign entity is the Holy See and the state is Vatican City, and they are not the same thing.

The Holy See, Sancta Sedes, is the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome: the government of the Catholic Church, and the party that concludes treaties and accredits ambassadors. Vatican City, Stato della Città del Vaticano, is the territory created in 1929 to give that government ground of its own. The See is the sovereignty; the city is the plinth.

The name of the place is older than either and means nothing ecclesiastical. Mons Vaticanus was the hill across the Tiber from the Roman city, ground of no importance, associated in antiquity chiefly with bad wine and a circus. The basilica stands there because a burial was there, and everything else followed the basilica.

What the Holy See is

The Holy See is the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, and it is a subject of international law in its own right rather than by virtue of any territory.

It concludes treaties, accredits ambassadors, sits as a permanent observer at the League of Nations, and is party to conventions on the laws of war and the protection of refugees. It did all of these things, without interruption, during the sixty years between 1870 and 1929 when it held no territory at all and the Pope did not leave a building. States continued to accredit envoys to a sovereign with no country, because what they were dealing with was never the country.

This is genuinely unusual and the article’s structure depends on it. Most states are territories which acquire governments. The Holy See is a government which acquired a territory, late, reluctantly, and only because the alternative was to remain a guest of somebody else’s.

What Vatican City is

Vatican City is a hundred and ten acres of central Rome, created by the concordat of 1929, whose entire constitutional purpose is to ensure that the Holy See is not resident anywhere.

It has a flag, a currency arrangement, a postal service, a legal code, a police force and a pharmacy. It has no army in any meaningful sense, no economy independent of the institution it houses, and no native population. Its sovereign is the Pope, in whom the executive, legislative and judicial powers of the state are combined without qualification, which makes it the last absolute monarchy in Europe and one of the very few in the world.

More than half of it is garden. Of the hundred and ten acres, the formal gardens occupy the larger share, rising up the slope behind the basilica. The smallest sovereign state in the world is mostly a park, with one of the largest churches ever built at the low end of it, and the observation is not a curiosity: the proportion is the clearest statement available of what the territory is for. It is not a country. It is grounds.

Why the distinction is maintained

The Holy See and the state are kept legally separate, and the separation does real work.

Treaties are concluded by the See and not by the city. Nunciatures represent the See. The League observership belongs to the See. The city is party to a handful of technical conventions on postal and telecommunications matters and to almost nothing else, because a hundred and ten acres has no interests in the world and the institution on them has a great many.

The practical consequence is visible in the Holy See’s own conduct. When it declines to join an international body it does so on the ground that a spiritual sovereignty should not vote on the affairs of states, an argument available to it precisely because the thing declining is not a country. And when a government wishes to be disagreeable it addresses its complaints to Vatican City, which has no view about anything.

History

The Roman Question

1870

In 1870 the armies of a unifying Italy entered Rome and the temporal power of the Papacy ended after eleven centuries.

The Papal States had run across the centre of the peninsula and had been governed, latterly, very badly. Their loss was neither surprising nor, to most Italians, regrettable. The Pope withdrew into the Vatican palace, declared himself a prisoner, refused to recognise the Kingdom that had taken his territory, and declined to set foot outside the walls.

His successors did the same for fifty-nine years. The Italian state offered a law of guarantees which would have secured the Pope’s person, his palaces and an annual payment. Successive Popes refused to accept it, on the ground that a unilateral statute which a parliament could repeal was not a settlement, and that accepting money from the government which had robbed them would have conceded the robbery.

The prisoner

The refusal was absolute, and it lasted longer than most of the people conducting it expected.

No Pope left the Vatican between 1870 and 1929. Papal blessings were given from an interior balcony rather than the loggia over the square. Catholics were instructed not to participate in the political life of the Italian Kingdom, an instruction that was widely ignored and slowly relaxed, and which had the effect of keeping the largest body of opinion in Italy out of Italian politics for a generation.

The quarrel was genuine and it was also, by the 1920s, extremely tiresome to both parties. The Italian state had a capital in which the most internationally recognised institution refused to acknowledge its existence. The Papacy had a principle and no room to move in. Neither could concede first, and the argument had become the kind that continues because stopping would require someone to have been wrong.

The concordat of 1929

The occasion

What broke the deadlock was not the Roman Question but the Italian one, and the Church was not the party that moved first.

The Pact of Turin was assembled through the 1920s out of concessions, statutes and guarantees rather than written at a stroke: a settlement among the Crown, the parliament, the socialist parties, the unions, the cooperatives and the Catholic social institutions, whose effect was to make the Italian monarchy the form through which organised labour held its gains. The Catholic welfare networks were woven into it from the start, because they were already doing much of the work that the settlement proposed to systematise.

A state negotiating with the Church’s institutions could not indefinitely refuse to negotiate with the Church. The concordat of 1929 was concluded alongside the Pact and by many of the same people.

What it settled

The concordat is a bargain of the same kind as the Pact of Turin, and it has four substantial clauses.

Sovereignty. Vatican City is created as a state and its independence guaranteed. The Roman Question is declared closed, the Pope recognises the Kingdom of Italy and its capital at Rome, and the Kingdom recognises the Holy See’s sovereignty.

Indemnity. Italy pays compensation for the lost Papal States: a capital sum and a holding of government securities. This clause is the reason the Holy See is solvent today, since the money was invested rather than spent and has been compounding for a century.

The Church’s institutions. Catholic schools, marriages, hospitals and welfare organisations are recognised in Italian law, with their own standing rather than as a concession.

And the hard clause: no claim on the economy. The Church renounces any pretension to a voice in the economic arrangements of the Italian state. It was inserted by the socialists, who had watched Catholic hierarchies elsewhere attempt to referee industrial questions on the side of employers, and who wanted it established at the outset that the Settlement’s economic substance was not open to episcopal revision.

Rome accepted the clause. It gave up something it had never successfully exercised in exchange for something it had wanted for sixty years, which is the ordinary shape of a good bargain. What nobody in the negotiating room anticipated was what the Church would do next.

The blessing of 1929

What was done

Having renounced any claim on the economic order, the Papacy proceeded to endorse it.

Pius XI had reigned since 1922. He was not a liberal, had no sympathy with revolution, and regarded the socialist parties’ theoretical materialism as an error he was under no obligation to soften. He had also spent his pontificate watching the industrial question destroy the moral authority of national churches which had sided with property, and he had inherited forty years of Catholic social teaching which described what was wrong with unrestrained capitalism and could point to nowhere that had done better.

Italy had now done better, by an arrangement which left property in place, put the unions inside the constitution rather than outside it, preserved the family and the parish as the units of social life, and did all of this under a Crown rather than a committee. It was, read charitably and Pius read it charitably, subsidiarity with a throne.

He said so, in an encyclical, and the Church has been living with the consequences ever since.

Why it mattered

The teaching had not changed. What changed was that it now had an address.

A doctrine which says that the economy exists for the person, that workers are entitled to organise, that property carries obligations and that decisions belong at the lowest level competent to take them, is a set of propositions. A doctrine which says all of that and adds that a country in southern Europe has been run on these lines since the 1920s and has neither collapsed nor tyrannised anybody is an argument.

Catholic parties across Europe reorganised themselves around it within a generation. The Christian-social and Catholic-labour traditions which had been minority tendencies inside confessional parties became their governing wings. Where Catholic parties held power they built welfare systems which followed the Italian shape more closely than the Prussian one, and they said where the shape had come from.

What it cost

The blessing was not free and the Church has never been entirely comfortable with what it bought.

It committed the institution to a position in an argument which is still running. Popes since have had to answer for the endorsement in countries where it was politically inconvenient, and to explain repeatedly that blessing one settlement is not a doctrine of government. The teaching on the form of the state remained, and remains, indifferent: no constitution is required by the faith, and regimes are judged by whether they serve the person rather than by their shape. That indifference is what allows the Church to bless a socialist monarchy in Italy, denounce the Russian Republic as a tyranny, and refuse to be claimed by either side of the long contest between them.

It also made the Church’s later silences louder. An institution which has demonstrated that it will speak about the arrangement of an economy is an institution which has demonstrated that it can speak.

What the blessing became

The universities

The mechanism by which an Italian settlement became a doctrine held on four continents was the Roman university system.

The pontifical universities form the Church’s senior clergy and its diplomats. Bishops of Lima, Lagos and Manila were taught social doctrine in Rome by men who had watched the Italian arrangement work, and took it home as ordinary Catholic teaching rather than as a foreign enthusiasm. The teaching was systematised in Rome, examined in Rome, and exported by people who had been formed there.

Latin America

In Latin America the doctrine had its largest effect, and the effect was that Rome had already said yes.

Base communities, the option for the poor, and a theology which read the Gospel as addressed to the conditions of actual life all developed there. What did not happen was the discipline. Rome had blessed a settlement built on substantially the same propositions forty years earlier and could not coherently condemn their restatement. Theologians were questioned and occasionally corrected on particular points. They were not silenced, their books were not placed under prohibition, and the priests who worked in the base communities did so with their bishops’ licence.

Priests were still murdered. Governments and the men who paid them killed catechists, organisers and clergy across the continent for three decades, and the Church lost people in numbers it had not lost since the Reformation. The point is not that the Church was safe. It is that when its people were killed for teaching what the Church taught, the Church was not simultaneously disciplining them for it.

The institutional result is that Catholicism held ground in Latin America that a Church at war with its own theologians would certainly have lost. Where the Church was the body that had stood with the poor, the evangelical churches which took so much of the continent from us found less room.

The Jesuits

The Society of Jesus became the intellectual engine of the social tradition, and was punished for it at intervals by the Popes it was serving.

Jesuits staffed the universities where the doctrine was systematised, ran the Latin American institutions where it was applied, and produced most of the theology that extended it. They also went further than Rome intended on a regular basis, and were disciplined for it: superiors removed, provinces placed under visitation, individual scholars silenced for a period and then quietly restored.

The pattern held for most of the century. The order did the Church’s boldest thinking and absorbed the consequences of thinking it, which is an arrangement that suited the Papacy and that the Society has never been able to decide whether to resent.

The council of the 1960s

What it settled

A general council met in the 1960s and reconsidered the Church’s relation to the modern world.

It reformed the liturgy, permitting and then normalising the vernacular. It declared that no person may be coerced in matters of religion, which required the Church to abandon positions it had held for centuries about the rights of error. It reconsidered the Church’s relation to the other Christian communions, to Judaism and to Islam. And it issued a constitution on the Church in the modern world which did for the whole Church what Pius XI’s encyclical had done for one country.

The social document carried more authority than any comparable statement the Church had issued, because there was something behind it. A council writing about economic justice in the abstract is a council with an opinion. A council writing about economic justice with forty years of Italian practice, a continent of Latin American application and a network of European parties in the room is a council legislating for something that already exists.

The liturgy, and the division

The reform of the liturgy produced a division which has never closed and which now maps onto every other argument in the Church.

The older rite survived as a permitted exception, and the permission was used by people who wanted more than a liturgy. Attachment to the old Mass became the banner of a general traditionalism: against the vernacular, against the declaration on religious liberty, against the ecumenical opening, and latterly against the relaxation on clerical celibacy and the restoration of women to the diaconate.

The result is that the Church’s deepest division is visible every Sunday and is legible at a glance. Each side reads the other’s Mass as a statement about everything else, and both are substantially right to.

Latin

The council did one further thing, and its consequences run through the Curia to this day: it revived Latin as a working language.

The argument was that a Church which had just committed itself to the vernacular in worship needed more than ever a common tongue for its government, and that any living language chosen for the purpose would hand its native speakers an advantage over everybody else. Latin belonged to nobody, which was precisely the qualification.

The revival was not symbolic. Curial business is conducted in it, the dicasteries draft in it, and the authoritative text of any contested instrument is the Latin one. Officials arriving in Rome from anywhere in the world spend their first year acquiring a working competence, and the ones who never acquire it are quietly marked as unlikely to rise.

This is the reason the internationalisation of the Curia actually succeeded. An office working in Italian will be run by Italians however its senior posts are distributed. An office working in a language that is nobody’s mother tongue can be staffed from anywhere, and over sixty years it has been.

The war

The war

The Papacy was silent about the murder of Europe’s Jews, and the silence is the older of this article’s two wounds.

The calculation was made deliberately and was recorded at the time. An explicit condemnation would provoke reprisals against Catholic institutions and populations in occupied Europe, would end the Church’s ability to do quiet work for individuals, and would be disregarded by the people it was addressed to. Rome judged that it could save more by working than by speaking, and it did work: houses were opened, documents were provided, individuals were hidden, and the numbers are real.

The numbers are also small against the scale, and the Papacy knew that too.

Why it is worse here

The silence is commonly defended on the ground that the Papacy was an institution which did not make political pronouncements and could not have been expected to start.

That defence is not available. This Papacy had broken exactly that convention within living memory, publicly, in an encyclical, on a matter of contested politics, in the teeth of considerable opposition, and had been proved right. Pius XI blessed the Pact of Turin. His successor declined to condemn the extermination of a people.

The Church has never reconciled those two acts and has very largely avoided being asked to. The archives of the period are open, the historical literature is substantial, and no Pope has been required to account for the difference in any forum that could compel an answer. What stands in place of an account is the true observation that the Church saved some people, offered as though it addressed a charge about the ones it did not.

In France the defence is thinner still. The fascist regime there treated the Church as a rival authority and suppressed it: houses closed, clergy imprisoned, the hierarchy silenced and its schools seized. The Church in France was a victim of the regime and had no accommodation to protect, and Rome was silent about the murdered anyway.

The abuse crisis

What was done

For most of the twentieth century the Catholic Church moved priests who had sexually abused children from parish to parish rather than reporting them, and the practice was not local, accidental or unknown to the institution.

The mechanism was consistent across continents. A complaint reached a bishop. The priest was sent for assessment, treated, and reassigned to a parish which was not told. The complainant was urged toward forgiveness and sometimes toward silence, occasionally by agreement and occasionally by pressure. The file went into a confidential archive under canonical seal. The civil authorities were not informed, because the canonical process did not contemplate informing them and the institutional instinct was that the Church dealt with its own.

The injury the process was designed to address was the scandal, not the child. This is not an inference. It is what the governing documents said.

When it broke

It broke late and then all at once, in the 2010s, and it broke everywhere within about four years.

Decades of suppression had held far longer than anyone outside the institution realised, partly because national churches were institutionally stronger and partly because the Church’s moral standing on social questions had bought it an unusual degree of deference from the press. When it went, it went in every direction simultaneously: the Realm, Ireland, Great Britain, the German dioceses, Australia, the Latin American churches. Each national collapse fed the next, because the pattern was so plainly identical that no hierarchy could claim a local aberration.

The institution had known for twenty years. The files opened in the 2010s showed correspondence from the early 1990s in which the scale, the recidivism and the legal exposure were all understood at a senior level. The reckoning did not come twenty years after the crimes. It came twenty years after the Church had established for itself what was happening.

The archive

A Pope opened the Roman archive, fully, and the consequences are still working through the courts.

The decision was taken against the advice of almost everyone qualified to give it and it is the single most consequential act of the last pontificate. Everything the Holy See held on the handling of abuse complaints was released to civil investigators in the jurisdictions concerned, without conditions and without a rolling date.

What it revealed about Rome was bad and what it revealed about the dioceses was worse, because the Roman files recorded what bishops had reported and the diocesan files recorded what they had done. The diocesan archives were not covered by the decision and most of them remain closed. A bishop’s files are his, under canon law, and the Holy See’s authority to compel their production is contested by the bishops who would have to produce them.

This is the position at present. Rome has opened everything it holds. A substantial number of national hierarchies have not, are being pressed to, and are resisting on grounds of canonical propriety which nobody outside the Church finds credible and which are not, in strict law, wrong.

What was built

The machinery that now exists is real, and it arrived twenty years after the institution knew it was needed.

Civil reporting is mandatory and is enforced by removal. A tribunal exists with jurisdiction to try bishops for concealment and has used it. Dioceses are audited and the audits are published. Compensation schemes operate in most national churches, some of them adequately funded.

The Register’s assessment is that the Church did eventually do the right thing and should not be congratulated for the timing. Every one of these measures was available at any point in the preceding forty years. Each was adopted after the alternatives had been exhausted, which in practice meant after the criminal courts, the civil courts and the press had made the alternatives impossible.

Geography

The ground

A hundred and ten acres, bounded by a wall on three sides and by the colonnade on the fourth, and more than half of it garden.

The basilica and its square occupy the low ground at the eastern end. The Apostolic Palace and the museums run north along the wall. Behind and above them the gardens rise across the slope: formal parterres, a wood, glasshouses, a working kitchen garden and a number of fountains, laid out over four centuries and maintained by a staff which is the largest single body of manual workers in the state.

There is also a railway station which handles almost nothing, a heliport, a fire service, a pharmacy which supplies medicines Italian regulation does not permit, a supermarket, a post office and a power supply. The smallest sovereign state in the world is also a functioning municipality, and the municipal apparatus is disproportionate to the acreage because it serves a daily population many times the resident one.

Beyond the walls the Holy See holds a number of properties under the concordat with the immunities of an embassy: the major basilicas outside the walls, the offices of several dicasteries scattered across Rome, and the summer residence in the Alban Hills. They are not part of the state and are not subject to Italian jurisdiction, which is an arrangement Italian municipal authorities find tiresome and have never seriously challenged.

Government and politics

The Pope

The Pope is Bishop of Rome, head of the college of bishops, sovereign of Vatican City, and the last absolute monarch in Europe.

Within the Church his authority is described as full, supreme and immediate, exercisable over every diocese and every believer without intermediary. In practice a Pope governs a body of one and a third billion people through a Curia he does not staff, national hierarchies he appoints slowly, and religious orders with their own law, and the gap between the theory of papal authority and the daily experience of exercising it is the oldest joke in Rome.

The Curia

The Roman Curia is now genuinely international, which is recent, deliberate and the result of the language decision rather than of any personnel policy.

Successive reorganisations flattened the dicasteries, imposed fixed terms on senior appointments, and required that the senior staff of each department be drawn from more than one continent. Comparable reforms had been attempted before and had foundered on the permanent Italian substructure. This one did not, because a Curia working in Latin has no home-language advantage to defend.

The consequence is that the departments which run the Church are staffed from everywhere and that the institution’s centre of administrative gravity has moved a good deal further than its centre of theological gravity.

The Secretary of State

The Cardinal Secretary of State is effectively the head of the Church’s government, and the present holder is not the Pope’s man.

The office coordinates the dicasteries, conducts the Holy See’s diplomacy and controls access. Its holder is normally the Pope’s own choice and his closest collaborator.

The present Secretary of State is neither. He was the compromise that ended the deadlock in the 2025 conclave, brought in by the electors as the price of an outcome, and Peter II accepted him because accepting him was the condition of being elected at all. The two men work together correctly. Neither has ever suggested they are friends, and the Pope’s difficulty in moving the Curia is substantially explained by the fact that the man who runs it was installed by the people the Pope was elected instead of.

The conclave

A Pope is elected by the cardinals under eighty, sealed into the Sistine Chapel, by a two-thirds majority, with the ballots burnt after each scrutiny and the smoke serving as the signal.

The procedure has not been altered and there has been no reason to alter it. It remains the only genuinely secret election of consequence anywhere, and the most watched.

The interregnum

On a Pope’s death or resignation the government of the Church stops.

The Cardinal Camerlengo takes custody of the property and the machinery. Every senior official ceases to hold office, the Secretary of State included. The College of Cardinals may administer what cannot wait and is expressly forbidden to decide anything that can: no appointments, no legislation, no changes of policy, no exercise of the powers that belong to the Pope alone.

A sovereignty that switches itself off is unlike any other state in the world, and the Church regards the inertness as a feature. An interregnum in which nothing can be settled is an interregnum nobody can profit from.

Resignation

Papal resignation is now normal, and the present Pope has said he will use it.

A predecessor resigned, the precedent held through the awkwardness of two living men in white, and successive Popes have treated the office as one that may be laid down when its holder can no longer do the work. Peter II stated at his first audience that he would go when that point arrived. He was sixty-two at his election and is sixty-six now, so the undertaking is not expected to be tested for a long time, which is itself a fact about the pontificate: he has decades, and has so far used three years of them holding the Church together rather than moving it.

The Governorate

The city is administered separately from the Church, and since the last reform it has been run by a lay administrator on a commercial contract.

The pontifical commission of cardinals remains in place as the supervising authority. Beneath it the actual management of the territory, the staff, the museums, the utilities and the budget was professionalised and put out to a fixed-term appointment on performance terms, in the same way a large municipality or a heritage estate would be run anywhere.

The reform was resisted and has worked. The objection was that the administration of the Pope’s own household ground should not be a matter of contract, and the answer was that it had previously been a matter of ecclesiastical seniority, which had produced the worst-run square mile in Europe. The museums now open on time, the accounts are audited to a commercial standard, and the man responsible can be dismissed for failing to deliver, which is not true of anybody else in the Vatican.

Law and doctrine

Celibacy

Clerical celibacy was relaxed, after a synod which left the Church visibly divided, and the division has defined the last two pontificates.

Married men may now be ordained in defined circumstances. The circumstances were drawn narrowly and have been interpreted more broadly than the drafters intended, which is what happens to narrow drafting. The concession has told on vocations, which had been falling for two generations and have stabilised.

A substantial body in the Church regards the change as the beginning of the end. Their argument is not principally about marriage: it is that a discipline held for a thousand years was abandoned under demographic pressure, and that a Church which yields to pressure on one thing has conceded the principle that it yields.

The Eastern Catholic churches make the argument awkward for everybody. They are small and largely diaspora communities, and they have had a married priesthood throughout, in full communion, without anyone suggesting it compromised anything. Their existence is the standing proof that the Latin rule is a discipline and not a doctrine, which is exactly why the traditionalists find them inconvenient and largely decline to discuss them.

Women

Women were restored to the diaconate after a long study, and are not ordained to the priesthood.

The restoration was argued from history rather than from equality, on the evidence that the early Church had ordained deaconesses and that what had once been done could be done again. Women deacons preach, baptise, witness marriages and conduct funerals. They do not celebrate the Eucharist or absolve.

The question of the priesthood was not settled by the restoration and everybody involved knew it would not be. Those who wanted the diaconate as a stage said so. Those who opposed it said the same thing, which was the only point on which the two sides agreed.

Marriage and the bedroom

The Church’s doctrine on marriage is unchanged and its practice has been transformed.

Annulment was reformed into a process an ordinary person can use: simplified, made free, and devolved to diocesan tribunals with a short form for uncontested cases. What had been the preserve of the wealthy and the persistent became available, and the numbers rose accordingly. The doctrine that a valid marriage is indissoluble was not touched. The finding that a great many marriages were never valid became much easier to obtain.

On contraception the Church reaffirmed, and paid for it. The prohibition was reaffirmed against the advice of the Pope’s own commission. The laity stopped listening within a decade, and the authority spent on the question was never recovered. It is no longer pressed in preaching or in confession and it has never been rescinded, and the combination of a rule that binds nobody and cannot be withdrawn is the clearest limit on the Church’s much-advertised willingness to think again.

On homosexuality the same manoeuvre was attempted with more at stake. The teaching on marriage is held to be beyond the Church’s power to alter. Blessings of individuals are permitted and widely given. The distance between what is taught and what is done in parishes is very large and is not officially examined.

The pattern across all three is the same. This is a Church which will change what it does much sooner than it will change what it says, and which has become extremely skilled at maintaining that these are different things.

Canon law

The Church’s legal code was recodified after the council and is being revised again now.

The second revision is driven entirely by the abuse reforms, for a reason which the Church has stated in its own documents and which does it some credit: the procedures that failed were the procedures the code prescribed. The canonical process treated an accusation against a priest as a matter of internal discipline, bound the proceedings in confidentiality designed to protect the accused, and provided no route by which a complainant could compel anything.

The law that concealed the crisis is being rewritten by the institution it failed, which is the only body with the power to do it and the least likely to do it thoroughly.

Foreign relations

What it is for

The Holy See maintains the largest diplomatic corps in the world and it exists for two purposes in a settled order of priority.

The first is to protect the local Church: to secure its freedom to worship, teach, run schools and hospitals, appoint its own bishops and own its own property, in every state where Catholics live. A nuncio’s principal business is the concordat, the registration of church bodies, the tax treatment of institutions, and the steady unglamorous work of keeping a religious minority lawful.

The second is brokerage. A sovereignty with no territory to gain, no army, no economic interest and a presence in almost every country is an unusually credible mediator, and the Holy See has been used as one repeatedly: boundary disputes, hostage negotiations, back-channels between governments that could not be seen to talk. It has settled things states could not, precisely because nobody could work out what it wanted.

The League

The Holy See is a permanent observer at the League of Nations and has consistently refused full membership.

The refusal is principled and has been restated by every Pope since the League was reconstituted. A spiritual sovereignty which addresses itself to everybody should not cast votes on the affairs of states, because a vote is a side and a side forecloses an audience.

Observership gives it what it actually wants, which is standing to speak in the chamber, access to the machinery, and participation in the humanitarian conventions, with no obligation to take a position on anything else. It is the Holy See’s preferred arrangement everywhere and appears again in its relations with the European Concert, where it is an observer rather than a member and where the Concert’s founders have acknowledged that the subsidiarity written into the Treaty of Straßburg came out of Catholic social teaching.

Influence without a vote is the Holy See’s settled doctrine of its own place in the world. It is also, its critics observe, a position which allows an institution to shape outcomes it will never have to be accountable for.

Nuclear weapons

The Church has condemned nuclear weapons consistently and without qualification throughout, and this puts it permanently at odds with the Realm.

There has been no period of conditional acceptance. The Holy See’s position, from the first use onward, has been that a weapon which cannot discriminate between combatants and populations is illegitimate in possession as well as in use, and that deterrence founded on a credible threat to civilian populations is a standing intention to commit a crime.

The United Kingdom of America has a sea-based deterrent, considers the question settled, and contains an enormous Catholic population. American bishops have handled this by distinguishing the teaching from the obligation, which satisfies nobody and has held for seventy years. It is the one issue on which the Realm’s Catholics are asked to hold a position their state rejects, and the great majority of them decline to.

Italy

The concordat has held for a century and the relationship is settled, affectionate and periodically testy.

Two sovereignties share a city without merging. The Italian state provides the Vatican’s utilities, polices its visitors and staffs its workforce. The Church runs schools and hospitals within the Italian system and is woven into the social settlement the Pact of Turin built.

They fall out about schools, the tax treatment of Church property, and what the Pope says about Italian politics, on a roughly decennial cycle, and each quarrel is settled by negotiation between people who have known each other for years. Neither side thinks about 1870 and neither has forgotten it.

Italy remains Catholic culturally and is not especially observant, on the ordinary European pattern, with the qualification that the Church kept a social role the state never took from it and is therefore more present in ordinary life than attendance figures suggest.

Germany

The German church is the best-resourced and least-attended in Europe, and the combination gives its bishops an influence in Rome that nobody enjoys describing.

A state-collected levy funds it. The money is enormous, the institutional apparatus of hospitals, schools, universities and welfare organisations is correspondingly vast, and the churches are emptying. The largest Catholic bloc in the German Empire is in Bavaria, disestablished by concordat in the settlement of 1919 to 1923 and baroque rather than austere in its practice.

The awkwardness is that a declining church which funds a great deal of the Church’s international work has weight in Roman deliberations out of all proportion to its congregations, and everybody involved knows it and nobody states it.

Poland-Lithuania

Polish Catholicism here is confident, institutional and unmartyred, and it is a very different thing from a church that carried a nation through partition.

The Commonwealth was never partitioned, never occupied and never required the Church to be the keeper of a forbidden nationhood. The Church there was never the only Polish institution the Poles were permitted; it was one institution among many in a functioning state.

The result is a church with cathedrals, universities, a substantial episcopate and no wounds. It is less fervent than a church that had been the keeper of a forbidden nationhood would be, less politically central, and considerably less interesting to Rome, and the reason is simply that nothing was ever done to it.

Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary disestablished the Catholic Church in 1920 as a condition of the Illyrian crown, Rome took it badly, and Rome now concedes it was a favour.

The Imperial Reforms created a kingdom of Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims, which could not be founded under an established church without founding a grievance with it. Establishment went in all four crowns as part of the package.

Rome regarded this as a betrayal by the most Catholic dynasty in Europe and said so at the time, at length. A century later the position is that a church disestablished in 1920 was spared everything that happened to established churches in the decades afterwards, that it has had to earn its place in Austrian and Hungarian life rather than assume it, and that it is healthier for it. The Monarchy did the Church a favour which the Church spent fifty years resenting.

France

The French church was suppressed by the fascist regime and restored after it, which spared it the accommodation that other national churches had to explain.

The regime treated the Church as a rival authority with a foreign head, closed its houses, seized its schools, imprisoned clergy and silenced the hierarchy. There was no French Catholic collaboration of consequence because the regime did not offer terms.

The postwar French church therefore emerged with a clean record and very little else, and rebuilt from a weak position into the most intellectually productive church in Europe, which is where a good deal of the theology behind the council came from.

The Orthodox

Relations with Constantinople are the best in the Church’s modern history, and the reason is that the Ecumenical Patriarch has a state behind him.

The Byzantine Federation is a functioning power, and its Patriarch a figure with a real flock, real institutions and real weight, rather than the dignified remnant a diminished see would have left him. The dialogue between Rome and Constantinople is accordingly a conversation between two authorities rather than Rome’s courtesy toward a survivor, and it has produced more in sixty years than the previous nine hundred.

Moscow is a different matter. The Russian church is entangled with a state the Holy See regards as a tyranny and has been suspicious of Rome for reasons that are partly theological and mostly geopolitical. Relations are correct, cold and unproductive.

During the long contest the Holy See worked actively behind the lines in eastern Europe, supporting Catholic populations under Russian pressure through channels it has never fully described, and the Russian church’s suspicion of Rome is not without foundation.

The Anglicans

Relations with the Anglican communions are the warmest the Church has with any body outside itself, and since 2026 they have been a decision short of communion.

Commissions had produced substantial agreement on doctrines that once divided them since the council of the 1960s, and had never moved on the validity of Anglican orders or the nature of papal authority, because each is the point at which agreement would require one side to concede that it had been wrong about what it is. The Eastertide Council, which Peter II called inside four months of his election and which sat at Canterbury for seven weeks in 2026, found a formula for both: Anglican orders are declared valid and sufficient, and the papacy is restated as a primacy of service exercised only in council. It then deferred communion for five years, leaving women’s ordination and the Church of America’s marriage rites unresolved, and the Council reassembles at Canterbury at Pentecost in 2031 to proclaim communion or put it off.

The relationship with the Church of America specifically is warm and uncomplicated, and was not damaged by the election of a Pope formed in the Realm; the Archbishop of New Westminster received the news with unaffected pleasure and has said so repeatedly since.

Islam

Formal dialogue since the council, and what actually matters is local.

The institutional engagement is real and produces documents. The substance is in the places where Catholics and Muslims live alongside each other and have for centuries: Illyria, where a kingdom of three confessions names a Muslim figure in its own royal style, the Byzantine Federation, and the Arabian and North African churches. The doctrine has followed the practice rather than the other way round, which the Church does not advertise because it would rather be seen to have thought of it first.

Latin America

The continent where the social tradition had its largest effect is now the Church’s demographic and intellectual centre of gravity in the west.

It supplies theologians, cardinals and a body of pastoral practice that Europe increasingly borrows. The base communities have institutionalised. The bishops’ conferences are the most confident in the Church.

Africa

The Church is growing fastest in Africa and the African churches are largely uninterested in European arguments.

The seminaries are full, the congregations are young, and the questions being worked on are inculturation, traditional practice, polygamy, and the relationship between the Church and the customary authorities. The European controversies about celibacy and the diaconate are followed, voted on at synods, and regarded by most African bishops as a distraction from subjects that actually matter where they live.

This independence is the thing Rome has been slowest to understand. The assumption that the growing churches would eventually take sides in the European division has not been borne out, and the Curia’s internationalisation has only recently begun to reflect a Church whose future is being formed by people who do not share its preoccupations.

China

The Catholic Church in the Empire of China is lawful, growing and supervised, and there is no underground church, because there was never a state atheism to drive one underground.

The Qing did not fall, the compact of 1912 produced a constitutional empire with a secular citizenship and enforceable religious liberty, and Catholicism has existed there since as a lawful minority religion under ordinary regulation. There is no patriotic association and no parallel hierarchy, because there was never a government determined to build one.

Peking watches it the way it watches anything with a foreign head, and the appointment of bishops is handled through an arrangement of consultation which both sides describe as satisfactory and neither describes in detail. The Church there is small against the population, institutionally substantial, and growing steadily.

The whole character of the Chinese church consists in an absence. Nothing was ever done to it, so it was never broken, and it has the untroubled institutional confidence of a body that has never had to survive anything.

The Raj

In India the Church is ancient, small and institutionally weighty out of all proportion to its numbers.

The Malabar communities are older than most of European Christianity and trace themselves to the apostolic period. They are in communion with Rome and are not Latin, with their own liturgies and their own canon law, and they are where the Eastern Catholic churches are most genuinely at home rather than a diaspora.

The schools and hospitals reach far beyond the Catholic population and are the principal way in which most Indians encounter the Church at all.

Defence

The Guard

The Pontifical Swiss Guard is ceremonial, and the actual security of the Vatican is contracted to Italian services.

The Guard remains what it has been since 1506: Swiss, Catholic, unmarried on entry, recruited from a small number of cantons, in a uniform of Renaissance derivation. It mounts the ceremonial guard, attends the Pope on public occasions, and is the most photographed body of soldiers in the world.

It is not the thing that would stop anybody. Close protection, counter-terrorism, crowd control and the policing of twenty thousand daily visitors are conducted under agreement by the Italian state, with a small Vatican gendarmerie handling ordinary offences inside the walls.

The arrangement follows from the shooting. A Pope was shot in the square decades ago and survived, and forgave the man publicly and visited him in prison. The institutional decision taken afterwards was that the open-air audiences would continue, because a Pope behind glass was judged a greater loss than the risk of another attempt, and that the security required to make that possible was beyond the competence of a ceremonial guard and should be bought from people who did it professionally. The Guard kept the halberds. Somebody else does the work.

Economy

Where the money comes from

The Holy See is solvent because of the 1929 indemnity, and it is not rich in the way the phrase suggests.

Italy’s compensation for the Papal States was taken as cash and government securities, invested rather than spent, and has compounded for a century. The invested patrimony is the largest single source of income and the reason the institution survives years when nothing else works.

After that come the museums, which draw millions of paying visitors and cover a substantial share of the running costs of the state, and Peter’s Pence, the collection taken in dioceses worldwide, which is smaller than most people assume and falling with European practice.

The property is very large and is mostly not disposable. The Holy See owns a great deal of Rome, and almost all of it is either in use, protected, or held on terms that forbid sale.

The bank

The Vatican’s bank exists, and it was cleaned up half a century before any external authority compelled it.

The institution for the works of religion was established to hold and move money for religious orders and dioceses operating in places where ordinary banking was difficult or dangerous. It acquired, as such institutions do, a clientele with other reasons for wanting discretion.

The reform came in the 1970s and it came from the social teaching. A Church whose flagship doctrine was that economic arrangements must serve the person could not indefinitely operate an offshore facility, and the contradiction was stated in those terms, in public, by people whose authority came from the doctrine. External audit was imposed, the client list was cut to institutions of the Church, and the reporting obligations were made to match Italian standards.

It is the clearest case of the Church applying its own teaching to itself, and it is worth setting against the abuse record. The same institution that took forty years to protect children took ten to reform a bank. The comparison is not flattering and the Church has never volunteered it.

Demographics and society

Citizenship

There are a few hundred citizens of Vatican City, none of them was born one, and each will cease to be one.

Citizenship attaches to office. A cardinal resident in the city holds it; so does a member of the Swiss Guard, a diplomat of the Holy See on posting, and a lay official of sufficient seniority. It lapses when the office does, and the former citizen reverts to whatever nationality he held before, which everybody retains throughout.

Nobody is born a citizen and the state makes no provision for it. The handful of children who have been born within the walls, almost all of them to Guard families, took their parents’ nationality and were registered in Italy.

This is the strangest constitutional fact about the place and it follows directly from what the state is for. A territory created to give a government somewhere to stand does not need a people, and the Holy See has been careful never to acquire one, because a population would have interests and interests would have to be represented.

Who is actually there

Several hundred people live in Vatican City. Several thousand work there. They are not the same people.

The residents are cardinals, senior clergy, the religious communities that maintain the basilica and the household, and the Guard. Everybody else commutes. The archivists, the librarians, the museum staff, the gardeners, the electricians, the printers, the drivers and the shopkeepers arrive from Rome in the morning and go home at night, and they are overwhelmingly Italian lay people with Italian employment contracts.

The smallest state in the world is a commuter economy, and the practical government of the place is therefore an exercise in managing a workforce that lives somewhere else and is subject to somebody else’s labour law.

Culture and daily life

The Library

The Vatican Library is one of the great research libraries of the world and the least contested thing the Church owns.

It holds manuscripts from every tradition Europe has touched, is open to accredited scholars of any faith or none, lends and borrows internationally, and has been digitising steadily for thirty years. It is not a devotional collection and has never been run as one.

Nobody has ever had to defend it. In an institution which spends a great deal of its energy explaining itself, the library is the single asset that has required no explanation in five hundred years.

The Archive

The Apostolic Archive holds the working records of the papacy and is open to a rolling date, as state archives are.

Historians work there on the medieval and early modern material without restriction and have done for well over a century. The Church has been genuinely open about the Borgias and the Inquisition, and has made a point of it.

The abuse files were a separate question and were opened wholesale rather than by the rolling date. That decision is dealt with above. What remains closed is not in Rome.

The Observatory

The Holy See employs working astronomers, publishes in the ordinary literature, and mentions Galileo before anybody else can.

The observatory has telescopes, a meteorite collection of real scientific value, and a staff of Jesuit astronomers with conventional academic records. Its output is modest in volume and entirely respectable in quality.

Its institutional function is as much rhetorical as scientific and the Church makes no secret of it. An institution carrying the most famous science-and-religion quarrel in history decided a century ago that the best answer was to employ astronomers and let people notice. It has worked, to the extent that the Galileo case is now usually raised by Catholic apologists rather than against them.

It is worth observing what this demonstrates. The Church is entirely capable of identifying its worst story, getting in front of it, and converting it into an advertisement. It did this about a seventeenth-century astronomer. It did not do it about the children.

Demography

The Church is growing in Africa and parts of Asia, holding in Latin America, and collapsing in Europe.

The collapse is steepest in the countries where the institution was built. Attendance in Italy, France, Germany, Austria and the Low Countries has fallen for three generations and the fall is accelerating as the last practising cohort ages out.

The centre of gravity left Europe some time ago and the Curia has only just caught up. The internationalisation of the Roman departments is a response to a change that had already happened, not a cause of it.

Vocations

Seminaries are nearly empty in Europe, full in Africa and Asia, and the flow has reversed.

The continent that sent missionaries for four centuries now receives them. Irish, Italian and German parishes are staffed by Nigerian, Indian and Filipino priests, who arrive to serve congregations that are older, smaller and considerably less certain than the ones they left.

Numbers have stabilised overall, and the married-priest concession is part of the reason. This is awkward for everybody. The traditionalists who fought the concession must account for a recovery that followed it, and the reformers must account for a recovery that owes at least as much to Africa.

Pilgrimage

Jubilees are declared every twenty-five years, they bring millions, and the city is rebuilt around each one.

Between them there is a steady flood in which genuine pilgrims are heavily outnumbered by people who came for the ceiling. The Church long ago stopped attempting to distinguish them, on the reasoning that the distinction is not one an institution can make from the outside and that a person who came for the art has still come.

Devotion

Popular Marian devotion is the Church’s deepest root and its least governable, and Rome approves apparitions rarely, slowly and with visible reluctance.

Shrines draw more people than any liturgical occasion. The devotions organise themselves, spread without permission and persist without encouragement, and the hierarchy’s function in relation to them is almost entirely one of restraint: examining claims, declining most of them, and being careful not to be seen to disparage what the faithful are doing anyway.

The lay movements

The movements are powerful, various, extremely well connected in Rome, and answerable to no bishop in any way a bishop finds satisfactory.

Some grew out of the social tradition and run cooperatives, credit unions and worker associations. Others are devotional, or educational, or frankly political, and several of the largest are the fiercest institutional opponents of the reforming direction. They have their own finances, their own formation, their own access to the Curia, and a canonical status that makes them very difficult for a local hierarchy to discipline.

They are the Church’s most vital and least governable part, and every Pope for fifty years has arrived intending to bring them under control and left having decided that the energy was worth the indiscipline.

Charity

The Church’s relief and development work is among the largest in the world and is scrupulously non-political.

A confederation of national agencies runs hospitals, schools, refugee services and disaster relief at a scale few states match, and operates in places where nobody else will. Its governing rule is that it does not comment publicly on the conduct of the governments it works under, and the rule is enforced.

The tradeoff is made honestly and is stated in the agencies’ own documents: silence buys access, access saves lives, and the price of the bargain is that an organisation which sees a great deal says nothing about most of it. The Church has been criticised for this by people who have not proposed an alternative that keeps the clinics open.

Migration and climate

On migration and on the climate the Church speaks loudly, constantly, and at the cost of its friends.

The social tradition gives it an unembarrassed voice on both and it uses it against governments that consider themselves Catholic, which is most of the ones that resent it. On migration in particular it is the most consistent international critic in existence, and several states have quietly reduced their dealings with it as a result.

The press

The Holy See runs a serious multilingual newsroom of genuine professional standing, and a Pope who will not be managed by it.

Peter II gives unscripted answers in doorways and on aircraft, at a length and with a candour his communications staff find difficult, and the newsroom then spends the following week establishing what he meant. He has been asked to stop and has declined.

Symbols

The arms and the flag

The arms of the Holy See are the crossed keys of Peter beneath the triple tiara, and the flag is a square field halved gold and white bearing them.

The keys are the ones given to Peter in the Gospel, one gold and one silver, crossed and bound with a cord. The tiara above them is the triple crown, which a Pope wears once, at his coronation, and which every Pope bears in his arms.

The flag is square, which almost no national flag is. The gold half stands next to the staff and the white half flies, and the arms sit on the white. The anthem is a nineteenth-century march, adopted late and without much enthusiasm, which is played at ceremonies and which almost nobody can hum.

The crown that is worn and the crown that is not

The Papacy retained the coronation when other monarchies were abandoning ceremony, and the tiara is placed on a Pope’s head at his installation.

The decision to keep it was taken deliberately at the time of the council, against a current running the other way, on the argument that the office is not its holder’s to diminish and that a Pope who declines the crown is making a statement about his predecessors as much as about himself.

The result is the only crowning left in Europe, performed in a state of a hundred and ten acres, by an institution whose principal modern teaching is about the claims of the poor. The contradiction is put to every Pope at some point in his reign. The answers given have not improved on the first one.

The present pontificate

The election

The conclave of 2025 sat for six days and took a great many ballots, and the man it elected had not been discussed before it began.

Two blocs faced each other. Neither could reach two thirds and neither would yield, and the division was the one that runs through everything else: the settlement on celibacy, the diaconate, the liturgy, and whether the reforming direction of the previous half century should continue or stop.

What broke it was arithmetic rather than conviction. An American cardinal whom neither bloc had considered was acceptable to enough of both, and the votes moved to him over two scrutinies in the way they do when a deadlock finally gives.

The name

He took the name Peter, which no Pope has taken in two thousand years.

The avoidance is a matter of deference rather than law. There is no rule against it; there has simply been an unbroken understanding that the first Pope’s name belongs to the first Pope. Every man elected since has chosen otherwise, and after two millennia the negative custom had come to feel like a positive prohibition.

He broke it deliberately and it was received as exactly the break it announced. A Church that had spent sixty years reforming itself piecemeal was told, in a single word from the balcony (the evening is set out under The Loggia), that the new pontificate did not regard itself as a continuation. The traditionalists heard a threat, the reformers heard a promise, and both heard the same thing.

The prophecy

An old and almost certainly forged prophecy names a final Pope as Peter the Roman, under whom the city of seven hills is destroyed.

The text is a sixteenth-century fabrication attributed to a twelfth-century Irish bishop and has been regarded as spurious by every serious scholar who has examined it. It is also extremely well known, and within hours of the announcement it was everywhere.

He addressed it directly, early, and in plain terms, at his first press conference: that the document is a forgery, that its attribution is false, that the Church does not teach from it, and that he had chosen the name for the fisherman and not for the fabrication. He said it again on the plane home from the Realm in 2026, when he was asked whether he was Peter the Roman and answered that he was Peter from Detroit. The answer was unusual in being both true and effective. The apocalyptic reading survives in the places such things survive and it stopped being a question serious people asked him.

The man

He was born in Detroit, in the Grand Duchy of Michigan, into the industrial Catholicism the great migrations built.

He is an Augustinian friar, and spent twenty-six years in parish work, twelve of them in the poor quarters of Cali in New Granada, and as an auxiliary and then diocesan bishop on the Great Lakes, and came to Rome in his late fifties for a single dicastery post, Prefect for Bishops, which he held for four years before the conclave. He therefore knows the Church from underneath very well and the Curia from one office only, and the second half of that sentence explains most of his difficulties. His life is set out under Peter II.

He works in the papal apartments and sleeps in a smaller one, and declining the larger as a residence was his first act as Pope. He kept the coronation, including the tiara, on the ground that the office is not his to diminish, and accepted the tiara reluctantly and has not worn it since. His manner is plain and he does not draw attention to the plainness. The combination of an audacious name, a traditional installation and an undemonstrative man has been difficult for commentators, who have repeatedly predicted a programme from the signals and been wrong, and who did not predict the one he produced, at Canterbury.

The pontificate so far

He has published no encyclical, and the absence is noticed. His one formal document is an apostolic letter of 2027 on the Eastertide Declaration.

Three years in, the pontificate’s output, the Eastertide Council apart, is administrative: appointments, the canon law revision, the continuing pressure on national hierarchies over their archives. His defenders call it deliberation. His critics call it drift. The more exact description is that a man who took the most audacious name available has spent most of his reign preventing a schism, and has pursued one programme, the Council, which no one predicted from the signals.

The celibacy settlement is what consumes him. He inherited a Church divided by a concession he did not make, and his judgement has been that holding it together matters more than anything he might otherwise do. Whether that is wisdom or a failure of nerve is the argument about him.

The opposition

He faces two oppositions which dislike each other, and he can answer one of them.

The traditionalists object to the celibacy concession, the diaconate, the liturgy and the direction, and they say so publicly and at length. They are answerable in public, and he answers them.

The other opposition is the bishops who do not want their archives opened, and it is not theological at all. It works by delay: consultations requested, canonical objections raised, compliance promised and deferred. It cannot be answered in public because it does not state itself in public, and it has been considerably more effective.

The Realm

His election was received in the United Kingdom of America as a shock and within a year as obvious.

It had not occurred to anybody that a Pope might come from the Realm. The Realm’s cardinals are numerous and wealthy and represent no unified national church, since the Catholic hierarchy there is divided by polity and had never built an effective national conference until the Pope convened them for the Eastertide Council in 2026, an assembly that left a permanent conference behind; they arrive at a conclave as individuals to be courted separately rather than as a delegation. That is why nobody counted them, and it is why one of them could be elected without anyone seeing it coming.

The constitutional question was raised once and answered once. He had been born a subject of Ernest V, Supreme Governor of the Church of America until 2028. Asked at the first audience where his allegiance now lay, he said that the Bishop of Rome is the subject of no one. Neither the Realm nor the Holy See has examined the matter since, and both regard the non-examination as the correct handling.

The state visit was harder than the theology. An American Pope returning to the Realm produced months of protocol argument about who received him: the Governor-General as the resident Crown, the Prime Minister as head of government, or the Archbishop of New Westminster as the senior cleric of the established church. The Realm resolved it by having all three do it, simultaneously, and describing the result as a solution.

His relations with the King are genuinely warm and neither household has made anything of the history.

His first journey to a Spanish-speaking republic was a three-day state visit to Bogotá in 2027, made a state visit because the established Church’s concordat made the United States of New Granada his host. The Archbishop of Bogotá, Cardinal Fidel Arango, received him.

Assessment

Vatican City is a hundred and ten acres, mostly garden, containing a government that speaks to a billion people.

The state is a plinth and makes no pretence otherwise. The Holy See is the thing that matters, and its standing rests on an argument rather than on force, territory or wealth, which makes it unique among the sovereignties in this Register and which is why its record on that argument is the only measure worth applying to it.

On the record it did one very large thing right. In 1929 it blessed an arrangement it had every institutional reason to distrust, because the arrangement served the people it was for. That judgement gave Catholic social teaching an example, the example gave it authority, and the authority reshaped European politics and held Latin America. It was brave, it was not obvious at the time, and the Church has been entitled to the credit it has claimed for it ever since.

It then failed, twice, in the same way.

It was silent while Europe’s Jews were murdered. The calculation was that speech would cost more than work, and the work was real and was not enough. That silence is commonly defended by saying the Papacy did not make political interventions. This Papacy had made one, publicly and controversially, within living memory, and had been right.

It was silent for forty years about what its priests did to children. It moved men rather than reporting them, treated the scandal as the injury, and sealed the files. It knew the scale by the early 1990s and built the machinery in the 2020s. When a Pope finally opened the Roman archive the diocesan archives stayed shut, and most of them are shut now.

The pattern is worse than either failure taken alone. An institution which has never found its voice can plead that it had none. An institution which found one, used it, was vindicated, and then did not use it again has no such plea available. The Church proved in 1929 that it could speak into a question where speaking was costly. Everything after that is a choice.

What it does well it does very well. It cleaned its bank when its own doctrine made the contradiction unbearable, half a century before any outside authority obliged it to. It employs astronomers and mentions Galileo first. It runs the best library in Europe and opens it to anybody. It keeps clinics running in places no state will go. It has a diplomatic service that settles wars because it wants nothing.

And it applied none of that competence to the thing that mattered most. It identified its worst historical story and got in front of it, and it identified its worst living story and sat on it. The distance between those two responses is the fairest measure of the institution available, and the Register is not aware that anybody inside it has been required to explain it.

Peter II took the one name no Pope had taken in two thousand years, and has spent three years preventing a schism. He is sixty-six and may hold the office for twenty more. The reckoning he inherited is unfinished, the diocesan archives are still shut, and the record of the pontificate to date does not indicate which way he will move.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Peter II, the present Pope
• The Loggia, his first appearance on 12 May 2025
• Socialist Kingdom of Italy, the Pact of Turin, and the settlement the Church blessed
• Church of America, the established Anglican church of the Realm and Rome’s warmest relationship
• Austria-Hungary, disestablished in 1920 as the price of the Illyrian crown
• German Empire and the Kingdom of Bavaria, the Empire’s largest Catholic bloc
• Empire of China, where no underground church was ever driven underground
• League of Nations, where the Holy See observes and does not vote
• European Concert, whose subsidiarity came out of Catholic social teaching
• Ernest V, whose subject the present Pope was born

Categories

Nations of the World · Europe · Religion