American Catholics may have been surprised to learn through a report in The Washington Post of the significant involvement of Vatican diplomats in negotiations to resolve the standoff between the Trump administration and the Maduro government in Venezuela.

While the rest of the Catholic world enjoyed its Christmas Eve, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin was meeting with Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, discussing a deal that would allow Venezuela’s President Nicholás Maduro to escape to a comfortable exile in Russia before shots might be fired. Vatican officials in the end were unable to persuade Mr. Maduro to accept that option before his defenestration by U.S. Special Forces on Jan. 3.

Veteran Vatican journalist Victor Gaetan was less surprised by The Post’s account of the frenetic last-minute diplomacy aimed at the peaceful removal of Mr. Maduro. Mr. Gaetan is the author of God’s Diplomats: Pope Francis, Vatican Diplomacy and America’s Armageddon.

He saw in it a familiar example of the Vatican’s engaged and patient diplomacy—though this account offered a few surprises. Among those, Mr. Gaetan was impressed by the apparent reach of Vatican officials into Vladimir Putin’s inner circle in Moscow.

He described the report as “a reaffirmation of the way Vatican diplomacy works.” Cardinal Parolin was using “existing relations to do what the Vatican always does—and that is to seek to promote dialogue and avoid bloodshed.”

Mr. Gaetan noted the challenging diplomatic dynamics at play: the implacable Americans, jockeying business executives, officials in Russia and Turkey trying to create a credible out for the Venezuelan leader and the recalcitrant Mr. Maduro himself—for his own reasons resisting the attempt to end the standoff without violence. He said the episode speaks to the professionalism of the Vatican diplomats and the trust these disparate players were willing to place in them as the negotiations continued.

“Parolin was proactive in regard to trying to find a soft landing for Maduro because he has had excellent relations in Venezuela from the time he was the nuncio there,” Mr. Gaetan said, “and he also has [had for decades] good relationships with U.S. diplomats.” In recent years, the cardinal has proved to be a reliable and effective intermediary in negotiations around the edges of the devastating war in Ukraine.

The Maduro drama, he suggested, represents a hallmark of Vatican diplomacy—an insistence that dialogue, not violence, should direct international relations.

Cardinal Parolin’s deep connections in Venezuela no doubt made his outreach easier, but it was not because of those personal relationships that he became involved in the ultimately unsuccessful effort to extract Mr. Maduro. Vatican diplomats are opportunistic, Mr. Gaetan said, ready to intercede anytime with anyone if they perceive an opening to resolve tensions before disputing parties turn to violent means to achieve their ends.

The Vatican’s diplomatic reach rivals that of any superpower. The Holy See holds permanent observer status at the United Nations and maintains diplomatic relations with 184 nations, the European Union and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. It participates in scores of international governing bodies. Under Pope Francis, it extended its diplomatic reach to the global margins with appointments and cardinalate elevations in Asia and through new overtures to religious and political leaders in Muslim nations.

“Connections that have been developed throughout the years are everywhere important,” Mr. Gaetan said. “We see this all the time—the capacity, the dexterity of Vatican diplomats to entertain relations [across] the religious spectrum and political spectrum in any given country, including in the United States.”

And why do diplomats across political and ideological boundaries welcome Holy See interventions? Vatican diplomacy “is recognized by everyone” to “have no biased interests,” Mr. Gaetan said.

“They have no political, no economic, no military interests, and they are trusted; their advice has proven to be beneficial,” he said. “This is the record of Vatican diplomacy.”

Despite their moral and spiritual grounding, church diplomats can hardly be described as geopolitical idealists according to Mr. Gaetan. Theirs is not pie-in-the-sky diplomacy. In addressing difficult international entanglements, church diplomats decline to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Pragmatism and patience typify the Vatican diplomatic style. And when it becomes engaged, he said, “the Vatican does not think in terms of winning or losing; they are preoccupied, first of all, with facilitating understanding and avoiding violence.”

He calls that approach “pastoral diplomacy.”

Its pragmatism has served the Holy See’s diplomatic corps well, Mr. Gaetan said. Church diplomats and officials have had notable successes in mediating peacemaking in South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

Church officials or representatives negotiated the departure of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in 2017 and the surrender of Panama’s Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989. Decades of violence in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American states were brought to an end with the assistance of the church. That engagement was followed up by prominent roles among church officials in a number of transition and reconciliation processes.

A characteristic of Vatican diplomacy, according to Mr. Gaetan, is a resistance to the demands for “aggressive regime change.” The Vatican maintains a “time horizon,” Mr. Gaetan said, that extends across decades, “not years as we see the secular governments planning their policies.”

A premier example of that patience has been the Holy See’s engagement with Cuba. While some may question maintaining ties with what many deplore as an oppressive regime, Mr. Gaetan holds it up as an example of the church’s preference for slow and steady progress. It has never severed relations with Cuba and has been rewarded over time with small openings that breathed life into the local church through many dark years, perhaps a template for the church’s continuing and at times controversial engagement with Beijing.

The Vatican was instrumental in achieving a near normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States during the Obama administration. Under both terms of the Trump residency of the White House, that progress has been reversed—perhaps only more reason for Holy See diplomats to remain engaged in Cuba now.

Among other contemporary hotspots where Mr. Gaetan believes there is likely significant Vatican diplomacy at work are Iran and Ukraine. He notes that in December 2024, the pope made Archbishop Dominique Joseph Mathieu of Tehran-Isfahan a cardinal. In 2023, Chaldean Archbishop Imad Khoshaba Gargees became Tehran’s metropolitan archbishop.

“Their role is to communicate between the Iranian authorities and the Vatican,” he said. These days, “I can imagine that there is a lot of communication going on.”

The Vatican’s role in keeping lines of communication open between Russia and Ukraine, he believes, has also been and will remain significant. Cardinal Parolin has facilitated a number of prisoner exchanges between the two antagonistic nations. Pope Leo XIV has already met three times with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who gives every indication of valuing that relationship and how it may be best put to use in ending Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Mr. Gaetan expects that as the next chapters of the Venezuela saga play out, the church will continue to play an important mediating role, its focus remaining on peacemaking and protecting the vulnerable—and that includes once powerful political leaders who, in the end, turn to the church for assistance.

Secular authorities, he suggested, are too ready to resort to force to see their aims achieved while the church continues a restraining role focused on avoiding violence. This pattern has become clear “since the end of the Cold War,” he said, and in particular as the United States began to move more freely across the world as global hegemon.

“The positive opponent who comes with constructive, peaceful alternatives is the church,” Mr. Gaetan said—a dichotomy that will likely only become more obvious as two very different Americans, Donald Trump and Pope Leo, play profoundly different roles on the world stage. 

The United States under the Trump administration continued in January a campaign of self-imposed international isolation, not only jeopardizing its relationship with traditional allies in Europe and NATO because of its 19th-century ambitions for Greenland but withdrawing without much explanation from scores of multilateral institutions and commissions. The Trump White House may find itself soon in a position where it is literally unable to “speak” with its various international antagonists and superpower competitors because of that structural withdrawal—that is, unless it is able to locate a willing and reliable emissary.

Mr. Trump may wish to keep Pope Leo on speed dial.

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The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, support for Maduro’s ouster proves strongest in Latin America and a Portuguese priest doubles as a D.J. in Beirut, to the consternation of some scandalized Maronites.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).