Vatican City State

For more than a millennium, the popes governed territories across the Italian peninsula as powerful Christian sovereigns, a role that endured until the mid-1800s. Their lands shrank further in 1870 when Rome was incorporated into the emerging Italian state. In 1929, the Lateran Treaties negotiated between Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini formally created the sovereign microstate of Vatican City and recognized a special position for Roman Catholicism within Italy. A revised concordat in 1984 updated those agreements, ending Catholicism’s status as the official state religion and redefining church–state relations. Today, the Holy See focuses on a wide range of global concerns. These include defending the religious liberty of Catholics, addressing violence and discrimination against Christian minorities in Africa and the Middle East, advocating for refugees and migrants, and confronting the legacy and reality of clerical sexual abuse. The Vatican also engages deeply with humanitarian crises, promotes dialogue among religions, and wrestles with how doctrine, tradition, and theology should evolve amid rapid social change, globalization, and emerging challenges such as artificial intelligence and its perceived impact on belief and ethics. Roughly 1.3 billion people around the globe identify as Catholic, making it the largest branch of Christianity.