‘Renewing the face of the earth’: Catholic laywomen and Vatican engagement in the making of the early United Nations, 1945–52

This article examines the role of Catholic laywomen in the Roman Catholic Church’s efforts to consolidate the Holy See’s engagement with emerging international institutions during the immediate post-war period (1945–52). Drawing on the still rather recently opened Pius XII Vatican archives and previously unpublished sources, it explores how women in leadership positions within the International Union of Catholic Women’s Leagues (IUCWL) navigated tensions between tradition and modernity while contributing to debates on human and women’s rights within the nascent United Nations system. In these new (i.e. still forming) arenas, their work demanded a certain degree of practical innovation. It also involved complex negotiations: between doctrine and diplomacy; between submission to the Curia and hierarchy, and personal agency; among competing gender models and norms; and with the diversity of actors shaping global governance. The article underscores laywomen’s leadership in establishing and directing Catholic information offices, most notably the European Permanent Information Office for International Catholic Organizations at the United Nations, which was based in Geneva. It also illustrates laywomen’s capacity to forge strategic alliances across religious and ideological differences while participating in key UN commissions, including those on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Status of Women. These efforts not only advanced Catholic participation in international diplomacy but also fostered ad hoc cross-confessional and ideological collaborations, underscoring the complexity and significance of gendered Catholic internationalism and its contribution to religious and social change in the mid-twentieth century.