Catholicism and the Evolution of International Law Studies in Italy

Although there has been no Christian doctrine of international law in Italy, Catholicism still represented a source of inspiration for various scholars during the twentieth century when addressing the question of the foundations of international law. In a period of predominant positivism, alternative approaches, rooted in the universalistic view of the Catholic Church, sought to offer a narrative of the origins of international law, based on the idea of continuity with the ancient civitas christiana. This chapter seeks to assess how the scholarly debate took into account developments in the Catholic understanding of the role of law in the international community. Three key episodes are considered: the note of Pope Benedict XV qualifying the great war as ‘useless slaughter’; the ambivalent reaction of the Holy See to the birth of universal organizations; and the position of the Papacy vis-à-vis the Universal Declaration of Human Rights