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Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, is seen Sept. 28, 2019, addressing the 74th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations at U.N. headquarters in New York. Speaking to journalists outside Rome's Domus Mariae Church Jan. 17, 2026, Cardinal Parolin lamented the decline of diplomacy and confirmed a Washington Post report that the Holy See tried and failed to broker a peaceful transition in Venezuela.
OSV News photo/Brendan McDermid, Reuters
January 21, 2026
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From unilateral actions in Venezuela to continued violence in Iran, the world is steadily sliding into a “crisis of values” that risks sparking international war, the Vatican’s top diplomat warned.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, lamented the decline of diplomacy and confirmed a Washington Post report that the Holy See tried and failed to broker a peaceful transition in Venezuela.
“We had tried to find a solution that would avoid any bloodshed, perhaps by reaching an agreement also with Maduro and with the other representatives of the regime, but this was not possible,” Parolin said, according to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere Della Sera.
The Washington Post reported that Parolin met on Christmas Eve with Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, to inform U.S. officials that Russia was willing to grant asylum to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in an attempt to avoid bloodshed in Venezuela. Ultimately, the U.S. carried out a military operation in the early morning hours of Jan. 3, resulting in the capture of Maduro and his wife, and transporting them to New York to face narco-terrorism conspiracy charges.
Responding to a question regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to acquire Greenland, Parolin said solutions based on force “cannot be used.” He also warned that the “spirit of multilateralism that characterized the post-war years” was “being lost.”
“This is not acceptable, and will lead increasingly to conflict, to a war within the international community,” he said.
Parolin also expressed his concern over the “endless tragedy” in Iran where a crackdown on anti-government protests resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.
He emphasized the Holy See’s consistent call for diplomatic solutions instead of resorting to armed conflict and expressed his hope “that we can reach a resolution to this state of affairs.”
(Junno Arocho Esteves writes for OSV News from Malmö, Sweden.)
A version of this story appeared in the January 25, 2026, issue of The Catholic Registerwith the headline "Crisis of values could spark war: Parolin".
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