Cardinal Parolin, in wide-ranging interview, laments international drift from diplomacy to force

April 09, 2026

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CWN Editor's Note: In a wide-ranging interview with Dialoghi, a periodical published by the Italian Catholic Action movement, Cardinal Pietro Parolin lamented the drift from diplomacy to force in international relations.

“I am struck by how much determination—I was about to say ease—the war option is presented as decisive, almost inevitable, bending international law to one’s liking,” the Secretary of State of His Holiness said. “The awareness of the value of peace, the awareness of the tragic nature of war, the awareness of the importance of shared rules and of respecting them seems to have disappeared.”

Cardinal Parolin also discussed the European Union, the United Nations, China, Venezuela, and Greenland, as well as the contribution that Christians can make to public life: by their support of “human life and dignity, of religious freedom, of the proposal of correctives to the current economic-financial system in accordance with the principles of the social doctrine of the Church, of the protection of creation.”

Asked about the Trump administration’s professed support of Christian values, Cardinal Parolin said:

We cannot say that we love and defend life and be concerned only with that of the unborn without considering that life is also that of migrants who die at sea, of women and children who have nothing to eat, of peoples devastated by the weapons we produce and sell ... At the same time, those who are concerned about saving whales but justify the silent killing of huge numbers of human beings in the womb fall into the same contradiction.

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