On August 24, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, “Secretary for Relations with States” since 2014, i.e. the Vatican’s foreign minister, arrived in Moscow for a four-day trip, a notably long stay at this level of the Holy See’s hierarchy.
– The significance of this journey is also measured by the Russian figures he met: although he did not receive a personal audience with Vladimir Putin, the Vatican envoy had a one-hour meeting on August 25 with Sergei Lavrov, effectively his counterpart for the Russian Federation.
– He was accompanied on this occasion by Italian Bishop Giovanni d’Aniello, the apostolic nuncio to Russia since 2020. The following day, he held another talk with Yuri Ushakov, the president’s diplomatic adviser.
– Mgr Gallagher also met with Metropolitan Antony of Volokolamsk, this time his counterpart for the Russian Orthodox Church, who heads the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations and holds the rank of metropolitan, i.e. archbishop in the Orthodox tradition.
– While Gallagher’s trip was disclosed as early as August 6 by the Tass agency, the meeting with Sergei Lavrov was announced only four days earlier by Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one cannot help but feel that the Kremlin aimed to stage a diplomatic coup by revealing the visit early.
If the length of this journey can surprise, it is worth noting that Mgr Gallagher had previously travelled to Kyiv on July 20, where he was received by Volodymyr Zelensky and his foreign minister Andrii Sybiha.
– In Kyiv, Gallagher had been preceded a few days earlier by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, and Vatican special envoy for the war in Ukraine since 2023.
– Close to the Sant’Egidio community and with prior mediation experience at the end of the Mozambican civil war (1990), Cardinal Zuppi would have a somewhat different stance on Ukraine than that of the Secretariat of State led by Cardinal Parolin, which concentrates more on its traditional role as a discreet facilitator of exchanges between the parties (the Vatican’s diplomacy of “good offices,” less burdensome than formal mediation), whereas Zuppi would focus more on humanitarian aspects of the war and the suffering of civilians: he even visited a camp holding Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine.
– In any case, these visions are less opposed than complementary, and converge, for example, in the Vatican’s efforts to secure the return of Ukrainian children abducted to Russia, or to facilitate prisoner exchanges, which constitute one of the rare successes of the negotiation attempts between the two warring sides.
– In September, Cardinal Zuppi is also expected to travel to Moscow.
– As Mikael Corre recently noted, one must also pay attention to the timing of this trip, which effectively replaced the planned Russia-Ukraine visit of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, which was ultimately postponed, and occurred at the same time as the visit of CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow. For Russian Foreign Ministry analysts, it is not insignificant that the pope is American, and perceived as an opponent of Donald Trump. In any case, Gallagher’s role as the pope’s trusted confidant is thereby reinforced.
For the Holy See, which is accustomed to maintaining diplomatic contacts with even the most resistant states to the international order, the Kremlin nonetheless represents a particularly tough and difficult partner to persuade.
– On several occasions, the Holy See has proposed hosting negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations; Pope Leo XIV notably reiterated this offer shortly after his election in May 2025.
– Following his meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Mgr Gallagher reiterated the Holy See’s general call to end the conflict, but did not articulate any conditions or resolutions on more precise or technical points of cessation of hostilities, which is a sign that the Russian side offers very little room for deeper negotiation.
– One of the few points of convergence between the Russian, Vatican, and American diplomacies lies in the expressed will to defend Christians facing persecution worldwide. According to Lavrov himself, Mgr Gallagher would have expressed concern about restrictions on religious freedom in Ukraine, with a project to ban the Orthodox Church tied to the Moscow Patriarchate: a version that is subject to doubt.
In Moscow’s resistance, there is also the long-standing hostility of the Russian Orthodox world toward the Catholic realm, which itself forms part of its cultural animosity toward “the collective West,” instrumentalized by Kremlin propaganda; one of the Moscow Patriarchate’s grievances against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, emancipated from its oversight, is that the latter would seek closer ties with the Catholic Church in an ecumenical aim.
– In Ukraine, Pope Francis’s stance, which had seemed to place the aggressor and the victim back-to-back, and had even denounced the NATO “barking” at the Ukrainian border, had shocked even within the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church.
Beyond the war in Ukraine, Archbishop Gallagher also came to reassure the small Russian Catholic community, which faces harassment from the authorities.
– He celebrated a Mass for peace at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Moscow, built in the early 20th century for the Polish community and secularized for most of the Soviet era, from 1938 to 1991.
– The Catholic Church in Russia counts fewer than 400,000 faithful (barely 0.3% of the population), spread across four Latin-rite dioceses (Moscow, Saratov, Novosibirsk, and Irkutsk, all founded in the 1990s), an apostolic prefecture (in Sakhalin, a legacy of missions to Japan), and an ordinariate for Byzantine-rite Greek-Catholics.
– According to the latest figures from the Pontifical Yearbook, it numbers 216 priests, 181 religious, and 228 nuns across about 200 parishes, many of which have merged in recent years following a period of expansion after the collapse of the USSR.
The Russian Catholic Church currently finds itself in a delicate position; since the onset of the high-intensity conflict in February 2022, Catholic charitable organizations must operate ever more discreetly, for fear of being accused of external destabilization.
– All parishes and religious communities must be registered with the authorities, and some face significant difficulties. Moreover, since May 2, the Moscow Catholic archdiocese has been vacant, following the unexpected resignation, officially for health reasons, of Mgr Paolo Pezzi, 65, Italian-born archbishop who had led the see since 2007.
– A specialist in Siberian Catholicism, about which he wrote a thesis, close to the lay movement Communion and Liberation favored by the pope (as seen recently during Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Rimini), Mgr Pezzi is very representative of the Catholic clergy in Russia, who are either missionary, with religious orders playing a traditionally large role, or diasporic, with faithful often of Polish, Ukrainian, German, or Lithuanian origin.
– The bishop of Novosibirsk, the former Jesuit Joseph Werth, belongs to the Russian German-speaking minority, while his colleague Clemens Pickel, bishop of Saratov, hails from East Germany, and the bishop of Irkutsk has Polish roots.
– Monsignor Nikolai Dubinin, a Franciscan who serves as apostolic administrator of the Moscow diocese after having been its auxiliary bishop, is notable for being the first Catholic bishop in Russia in more than a century to be native to the country.
– Because of this diaspora character, making Catholicism seem fundamentally foreign to Russian culture for many, Latin-rite Catholics are paradoxically more tolerated than the Byzantine-rite Greek-Catholics, who were completely banned in the Soviet era and are viewed especially unfavorably by the Moscow Patriarchate, which regards them as renegades, emblematic of the Catholic Church’s “uniate” imperialist temptation toward the Orthodox world.
– If the relations between the Catholic Church and the Moscow Patriarchate, chilly under John Paul II, warmed at the start of Francis’s pontificate to the point of allowing the first meeting between the pope and Patriarch Kirill in Cuba in 2017—a symbolic site of the pope’s non-aligned diplomacy—, they have again faced great difficulties since the invasion of Ukraine, justified and blessed by Kirill.
– Mgr Gallagher also clarified that his meeting with Metropolitan Antony of Volokolamsk, who today maintains more cordial relations with the Catholic world than Patriarch Kirill, did not fall within the ecumenical dialogue, which in Rome falls under the Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity, not the Secretariat of State.
The arrival of Mgr Gallagher would also aim to sound out the ground for a new archbishop of Moscow. Officially, the Russian authorities do not intervene in episcopal appointments at any point, but unofficially it is very likely that Mgr Gallagher would consult them on the profile of the new archbishop.