MEĐUNARODNI PROBLEMI

The Holy See as a Norm Entrepreneur: Fraternity, Solidarity, and Secularism in Pope Francis’s Pontificate

Špehar Hrvoje (University of Zagreb – Faculty of Political Science, Zagreb, Croatia), hrvoje.spehar@fpzg.hr

This paper examines the papal discourse of Pope Francis as a site of norm entrepreneurship in contemporary world politics. Drawing on constructivist norm theory, Finnemore and Sikkink’s model of the norm life cycle, and Manners’ concept of normative power as a heuristic framework, it argues that Francis systematically translates Catholic social doctrine into universalistic normative frames—centred on fraternity, solidarity, and a post-secular engagement with the international order— thereby seeking to position the Holy See as a distinctive moral authority in global ethical discourse. The analysis proceeds through a qualitative discourse analysis of key papal documents produced between 2013 and 2025, including the encyclicals Laudato Si’ (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020), the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), the Document on Human Fraternity (Abu Dhabi, 2019), and selected addresses to the United Nations General Assembly and other international forums. Two analytical criteria guide the examination: lexical universalisation—the deployment of non-confessional vocabulary and the language of global rights and shared humanity—and secular accessibility, understood as the extent to which religiously grounded arguments are translated into a normative idiom accessible to secular interlocutors. The paper argues that the novelty of Francis’s pontificate lies not in the substance of the norms it promotes, but in the discursive mechanisms through which Catholic ethical commitments are constructed as globally legible claims—a “discursive double address” that retains theological grounding while aspiring to universal normative resonance. The analysis operates at the level of norm emergence, reconstructing the discursive conditions under which post-secular norm entrepreneurship might become possible, rather than assessing its empirical impact on international normative expectations.

Keywords: Holy See, Pope Francis, norm entrepreneurship, constructivism, normative power, fraternity, solidarity, secularism