By “What is clear, is that no other state on earth is even attempting to do what the Holy See is trying to do,” Alexander John Paul Lutz, a Helsinki Commission policy fellow, testified.
The U.S. Helsinki Commission examined how the Holy See conducts diplomacy amid growing global polarization and wars on the same day President Donald Trump denounced Pope Leo XIV.
In response to Trump’s social media post Monday calling Leo “terrible for foreign policy” and claiming responsibility for his election to the papacy, Alexander John Paul Lutz, a policy fellow at the Helsinki Commission, said during the April 13 hearing that Leo’s message, and the Holy See’s, is unique from other world powers.
“To all of this, the force, the bellicosity, the transactionalism, the insistence that every actor on the world stage must really be angling for or towards something political, Pope Leo responded with a different vision,” Lutz said.
Citing Leo’s address to the diplomatic corps in January, Lutz emphasized that unlike other global powers, Leo’s message asserts that “the protection of the principle of the inviolability of human dignity and the sanctity of life always counts for more than any mere national interest.”
“These are the grounds on which the Holy See conducts its diplomacy,” Lutz said, noting the Vatican engages all parties, but “never fully endorses any state’s political platform.” Rather, he said, the Holy See “will subject every policy it encounters, including those of the United States, to an intellectual and moral rigor that is likely to improve it,” and “insists on speaking the truth for the record, even when doing so may lead to misunderstanding and scorn.”
“What is clear is that no other state on earth is even attempting to do what the Holy See is trying to do, to address the world as it is while insisting that it answer to something higher than power,” Lutz said.
Victor Gaetan, senior correspondent for the National Catholic Register, the sister partner of EWTN News, echoed Lutz during his testimony and gave context for the Holy See’s diplomatic approach.
“The Vatican has bilateral relations with 184 nations and operates 124 nunciatures or embassies around the world,” Gaetan said. “The popeʼs right-hand man is the secretary of state, who is typically a diplomat, a priest diplomat. Because the diplomats are priests who take vows of silence regarding what they know, they often approach tasks as pastors, which helps explain why Vatican diplomats are notoriously discreet and why they are willing to meet even with dictators. No one is beyond salvation.”
Gaetan explained that Vatican diplomacy has four dimensions: representation, mediation, preservation, and evangelization. He emphasized mediation as “the most important element in Vatican diplomacy,” highlighting several instances of the Holy See’s success in resolving conflicts between nations.
He also noted Leo’s outspoken advocacy for peace is grounded in “the priorities and pragmatism of his predecessors,” including Pope John Paul II, whom Leo echoed in his recent vigil for piece, saying: “Enough of war!”
“The popeʼs critique of war in Iran and bombing in Lebanon should not be understood as a political,” Gaetan said. “Rather, it is a theological position grounded in what is called ‘just war theory,’ developed by none other than St. Augustine in the early fifth century and studied in all United States military academies.”
For a war to be justified, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it must be waged to fight against a grave evil, the damage caused by waging the war cannot be graver than the evil it is meant to eliminate, there must be a serious prospect of success, and all alternatives to war must have already been tried.
Other panelists at the briefing included Peter G. Martin, a former U.S. diplomat at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, and Jackie Aldrette, executive director of AVSI USA, a humanitarian aid organization that has projects in 41 countries.
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For perspective, the first NATION-STATES (a Western artifact) are often dated as coming at the Peace of Westphalia in A.D. 1648 following the Thirty Years War. And then, as European national boundaries were pretty much completed, with Italy and Germany as the last in 1870-1, the Vatican surrendered the last of its Papal State chess pieces, and even the “Eternal City” of Rome.
The PERENNIAL Catholic Church predates nation-states by well over a millennium and surely will outlast them all. History is long, almost as long as the irreducible Apostolic Succession. The novel situation, today, is that the alternative-universe of Islam did not even exist at the time of St. Augustine. And, moreover, the jihadist epicenter in Iran hides today under the veneer of a transitory nation-state letterhead, while it exports elemental terrorism against every notion of civilization.
While adhering to moral theology—and specifically to the principles of just war theory—the unaddressed NOVELTY today is the zealots nested within Islam. Islam as a culture external to Western historical and organic experience. Neutrality is submission to the inevitability of global Islam, just as it has been to the equally totalitarian Marxism of that Cold War.
This uncredentialled peasant fully accepts Pope Leo’s accent on eternal truths. But with an audience not familiar with that script, by what LANGUAGE AND VOCABULARY is the Church to communicate these things in a way that registers with the bubble universe of anti-Western/anti-Christian Islam—and especially anti-human jihad?
Even the self-evident word “fraternity”…what does this word mean when filtered through the lens of jihadist Islam? Inevitable membership in the umma? This is “peace,” ships passing in the night?
“Even the self-evident word “fraternity”…what does this word mean when filtered through the lens of jihadist Islam?”
It means, the willingness to accommodate an occasion of sin and cooperate with that which is evil, just as it does when one uses the word “fraternity”, in regards to those who deny the Sanctity and Dignity of the marital act within the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and thus deny God’s Desire that we respect and affirm The Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life from the moment of conception to natural death, in order to justify the engaging in or affirmation of acts, including sexual acts, that regardless of the actors, or the actors desire, demean the inherent Sanctity and Dignity of every Human Person. The desire to engage in a demeaning act of any nature, does not change the nature of the demeaning act, which is devoid of Love and evidence enough that the members of the hierarchy of The Catholic Church are infected with the heresy of modernism which is anathema, putting these members in a state of apostasy.
“This is going to be a nasty fight, given that “tolerance” has become the all-purpose bludgeon with whicho the sexual revolution, in all its manifestations, beats its adversaries into submission or drives them into catacombs. All the more reason, then, to be grateful for the courageous leadership shown by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, whose San Francisco archdiocese is arguably ground zero of the culture war that cannot be avoided—and that must be fought if Catholic institutions are to remain free to be themselves.”
San Francisco Catholics speak out for—and against—Abp. Cordileone – Catholic World Report
Pope Benedict XVI, identified the ramifications of Relativism:
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker Himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Christmas Greetings to the members of The Roman Curia, December 21, 2012
Pope Benedict’s Final Christmas Urbi et Orbi
“Fraternity” means to tolerate and accommodate sin in the name of Peace. All men of Good Will recognize you cannot have Peace in the absence of Love.
It Has Always Been About The Marriage In Heaven And On Earth.
“Blessed Are Those Called To The Wedding Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
J.M.J.
“Even the self-evident word “fraternity”…what does this word mean when filtered through the lens of jihadist Islam?”
It means, the willingness to accommodate an occasion of sin and cooperate with that which is evil, just as it does when one uses the word “fraternity”, in regards to those who deny the Sanctity and Dignity of the marital act within the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and thus deny God’s Desire that we respect and affirm The Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life from the moment of conception to natural death, in order to justify the engaging in or affirmation of acts, including sexual acts, that regardless of the actors, or the actors desire, demean the inherent Sanctity and Dignity of every Human Person. The desire to engage in a demeaning act of any nature, does not change the nature of the demeaning act, which is devoid of Love and evidence enough that there exists members of The Catholic Church, including members within the hierarchy, infected with the heresy of modernism which is anathema, putting these members in a state of apostasy.
The question is, who has the courage to be Catholic and inform those Baptized Catholics that they have been Charitably Anathema by Christ, the moment they no longer desired to Abide In The Word Of God, given the fact that the current Office Of The MUNUS and thus the current Ministerial Office is inflicted?
“This is going to be a nasty fight, given that “tolerance” has become the all-purpose bludgeon with which the sexual revolution, in all its manifestations, beats its adversaries into submission or drives them into catacombs. All the more reason, then, to be grateful for the courageous leadership shown by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, whose San Francisco archdiocese is arguably ground zero of the culture war that cannot be avoided—and that must be fought if Catholic institutions are to remain free to be themselves.”
San Francisco Catholics speak out for—and against—Abp. Cordileone – Catholic World Report
Pope Benedict XVI, identified the ramifications of Relativism:
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker Himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Christmas Greetings to the members of The Roman Curia, December 21, 2012
Pope Benedict’s Final Christmas Urbi et Orbi
“Fraternity” means to tolerate and accommodate sin in the name of Peace. All men of Good Will recognize you cannot have Peace in the absence of Love.
It Has Always Been About The Marriage In Heaven And On Earth.
“Blessed Are Those Called To The Wedding Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
Our Lady Of Fatima, Pray And Intercede For us, so that your Immaculate Heart Will Triumph, restoring The Peace Of Christ, Necessary For Human Flourishing. Amen🙏✝️💕🌹