Holy See Always Had International Status

A very good rebuttal of Geoffrey Robertson:

Before 1870, there were two subjects of international law: the Papal States and the Holy See. Of these two persons in international law the one, the Papal States, was extinguished by the Italian post-Risorgimento government when they invaded and overran those States in September 1870. But the Holy See which goes back to early Christian times and to an era where the concept of the nation state was unknown, continued to exist as the preeminent episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, and as such, diplomatically, and in other spheres, the Holy See was and is acting for the whole Catholic Church.

The Holy See remained a sovereign entity and a subject of general international law in the period between the annexation of the Papal States in 1870 and the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when the Vatican City State was created to solve the so-called Roman question (when the Pope withdrew to the Vatican and refused to recognise the Italian Government’s annexation of Rome and the Papal States) and give the Holy See a territorial dimension once again.

This can be seen by the practice of states, including Britain which re-established diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1914 after a break of 450 years. During this period, when the Holy See had no territory, the Holy See continued to conclude concordats and continued, with the consent of a majority of states, to exercise the active and passive right of legation. In fact in the course of the 59 years during which the Holy See held no territorial sovereignty, the number of states that had diplomatic relations with it, which had been reduced to 16, actually increased to 29.

So those like Robertson who claim that the Holy See’s international status was unilaterally created by the “fascist state of Italy in 1929” are using a bogus argument...