Could the Vatican become host to peace negotiations? Could himself become involved? At least some signs point in that direction. Pope Leo XIV, who was elected on May 8, 2025, as the successor to , who died on April 21, has signaled that the might be willing to mediate. This was further reinforced by Italy’s head of government, .
Late on Tuesday evening (May 20), Meloni announced on the social media channel X that she had “spoken by phone with the Holy Father about the next steps that need to be taken to build a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”
US President and some European heads of state had asked her to “assess the Holy See’s willingness” to host peace negotiations. And Pope Leo has confirmed his willingness to facilitate talks in the Vatican between both sides of the conflict.
In fact, it was Leo who had brought this vision to light. When on the evening of May 8, largely unknown to the public, he began his speech with the word “peace,” echoing Jesus’ first words as recorded in the Bible after his resurrection. No other word appeared more frequently in the first speech by the 267th Pope than “peace.” Leo sketched the picture of a “peace that is unarmed and disarming.” Since then, journalists have been discussing how this statement should be interpreted: in terms of spiritual detachment or concrete global politics.
Leo then provided further signals during his inauguration Mass. His very first formal visit was with and his wife. The Ukrainian president had been among the first to congratulate the new Pope by telephone the evening after his election. After the inauguration, Leo, the first US-born pope, also received US Vice President and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The two Catholic politicians were accompanied by their wives.
The official Vatican video of the meeting between Leo and Vance shows the politician handing over a large envelope: a greeting from Donald Trump. Questions around Ukraine also circulated around this meeting with the US politicians.
This is especially notable given that it took Pope Francis a considerable amount of time after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, to . Up until that point, he had only deplored the suffering of the population on both sides, leading to criticism for only mentioning the victims and not the perpetrators.
The Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church
It was clear that Francis did not want to sever ties with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB man and close Putin confidant. At the same time, Zelenskyy made it very clear after the death of 88-year-old Francis that the Vatican had repeatedly facilitated prisoner exchanges between the warring countries without much publicity and had also supported Ukrainian children who had been abducted to Russia.
After Trump’s erratic and hapless attempts to persuade to back down, politicians are now turning their attention to Rome. But would that even be possible — diplomatically, logistically, and in terms of security?
Most recently, the Vatican’s administrative body, the Curia, organized and managed two events of global significance with hundreds of government officials within three weeks. It was in this context that the image of Trump and Zelenskyy seated on two plain chairs in a side chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica, on the sidelines of Francis’ funeral ceremony, quickly became iconic.
Any security matters that would overburden the 120 or so men of the Papal Swiss Guard always become the responsibility of the Italian state. According to Prime Minister Meloni, her country is “prepared to play its part to facilitate contacts and work towards peace.”
Several times since February 2022, Francis dispatched one of his most trusted cardinals, the current president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Matteo Maria Zuppi, to Moscow and Kyiv as a (then unsuccessful) mediator, and once also to Beijing and Washington. And in the last weeks of Francis’ papacy, another cardinal was also traveling in the Ukrainian crisis areas.
A matter of weeks?
If both sides are willing, insiders say, an attempt at mediation could start in the Vatican within three or four weeks. But it is also clear that the Pope will not be continuously present at the actual talks. Those talks involve dialogue on a practical level. The last time Russian President for talks was in June 2019.
Benjamin Dahlke, Catholic theologian at the University of Eichstätt and one of Germany’s most knowledgeable experts on the church in the US, is “cautious” about the possibility of the Vatican mediating between Russia and Ukraine. During his election campaign, President Trump announced that he would “solve the war within a day. That obviously didn’t work out,” said the 43-year-old in an interview with DW. In his opinion, Trump is “at a loss” and is looking to the Vatican “as a new player in order to create new movement.”
Meanwhile, Stefan Mückl, a specialist in church law who teaches at Rome’s Opus Dei University, emphasizes the importance of the Vatican’s neutral role. “Pope Leo will adhere to the Holy See’s established position, namely strict neutrality, without indicating any intrinsic preference,” he told Cologne’s Domradio radio station.
The expert on the Eastern Church, Regina Elsner, who teaches in Münster, expressed a more critical view on Catholic Domradio. He believes that there is a chance that the church headquarters will be accepted as a neutral negotiating venue, together with Italy. But, he pointed out, Pope Francis lost a lot of credibility with the Ukrainian side in the last few years of his pontificate due to his benevolent attitude towards Moscow.
The Pope’s chief diplomat
Every word that Pope Leo now utters in public is being closely monitored worldwide, especially with regard to the conflict in Eastern Europe. There is a good chance that his “foreign minister,” Archbishop Paul Gallagher (71), who has been serving the Vatican for 40 years and has been responsible for relations with states for a good ten years, will set off on trips very soon and hold talks that are rarely or never made public.
Last weekend in Rome, US Secretary of State Rubio was one of the people who met with Gallagher. According to the US media, the politician spoke afterwards with gratitude of the Vatican’s willingness to play a “constructive and positive role.”
This article was originally written in German.
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