Catholic Internationalism after World War II: The Vatican's Role in Early Postwar Nation-Building

During the years after World War I, the central government of the Catholic Church pioneered a new mode of international diplomacy based on the penetration of Europe's new and newly reconstituted nation-states through treaties recognized under international law. This project -- which I call "Catholic internationalism" -- was initially crafted as a way to oppose the influence of first liberalism, and then communism, in Europe. One key regime with which the Vatican concluded a treaty of this sort was Fascist Italy.

After World War II, the Vatican was greatly concerned that its interwar legal efforts would come undone on the Italian peninsula. For this reason, it covertly inserted itself in the Constituent Assembly debates in Italy (1946-8), in the attempt to shape the new constitution's codification of a legal relationship between Church and State (ultimately, art. 7 of the Constitution), and its laws governing marriage and the family (ultimately, art. 29), and education and schooling (art.33). In the mid-1940s, the Vatican's efforts would be surprisingly successful. In this way, in continuity with much recent work by scholars of European history (including Udi Greenberg, Noah Strote, Phil Nord, and others), my paper demonstrates that it is a mistake to treat 1945 as a year zero, and as a radical break with the past: instead, the reconstruction of Italy, too, was fundamentally shaped by the redeployment of conservative models of nation and state-building, developed in the interwar years.