The Roman Catholic Church’s Multilevel Mediation Between Aid Organisations and Secular Political Institutions: a Case of Migration Governance in Europe

Migration and globalization phenomena have not yet propelled a complete reconceptualization of the role of religion in political fora; rather, they have uncovered contradictions and polarization practices at the heart of the secular-religious dichotomies of our age. Despite a relatively recent attention on the part of scholars and practitioners over the last twenty years, the interlink between forced displacement and religion has gained growing attention; in turn, appraisals of this nexus have fostered analyses at the intersection of different sub-disciplines in Politics, including research on humanitarianism, civil society networks and policy analysis to shed further light on the relationship between religious and secular political actors. This paper therefore investigates how religious organisations interpret and engage with secular frameworks and discourses to strategically achieve their goals. To probe into these questions, the paper analyses one specific theocratic institution, namely the Roman Catholic Church and its mediating role between local aid organisations and multilevel governance in migration politics. The 21st Century Catholic Church has indeed signaled a paradigmatic shift towards a theology of migration enriched by a global perspective of transnational governance, as demonstrated, inter alia, by the creation of the Migrants and Refugees Section within the Vatican’s newly reformed Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development during Pope Francis’ pontificate. Scholars have also increasingly identified the Roman Catholic Church as the most influential religious transnational actor. Yet, the presence of Catholic institutions in European and global affairs is met by a disproportionate lack of academic research in Politics with regards to the Roman Catholic Church, and even less so with regards to its governing body, the Holy See. Whilst other disciplines have traditionally studied the history, legality and theologies underpinning the Holy See’s relations with secular powers, research on faith-based humanitarianism in contexts of forced migration started to engage with local and transnational religious actors only in the early 2000s; this growing literature nonetheless overlooks policy analyses of the Church in relation to its NGOs (CNGOs) and to secular political institutions at the local, national, regional, and global levels. Likewise, extensive research on Catholic organisations and displacement is lacking due to the under-appreciation of the two-fold nature of the Church; by acting as a non-state religious institution (Catholicism) and as a state actor invested with international subjectivity and personality (the Holy See), the Catholic Church can engage on multiple levels with secular organisations in ways that no other religion or state can replicate. Informed by an iterative qualitative methodology based on case studies, this paper presents new data collected in Italy and in the Vatican City State via key informant interviews with officials of the Holy See, policy makers and humanitarian practitioners. Through its interdisciplinary analysis of the “local”, yet equally “global”, network of CNGOs engaged with forced migrants, this paper envisages contributing to appraisals of the state of the field on Religion and Politics; it equally opens to further opportunities for scholars interested in moral perspectives negotiated by transnational religious actors in IR, the EU, and migration policy making.