This article explores new political practices of the Roman Catholic Church by means of a close critical examination of the beatification of the Martyrs of Cajonos, two indigenous men from the Mexican village of San Francisco Cajonos, Oaxaca, in 2002. The Church's new strategy to promote an upsurge in canonizations and beatifications forms part of a " war of images, " in Serge Gruzinski's terms, deployed to maintain apparently peripheral populations within the Church's central paternalistic fold of social and moral authority and influence, while at the same time as it must be seen to remain open to local cultures and realities. In Oaxaca and elsewhere, this ecclesiastical technique of " emplacement " may be understood as an attempt to engage indigenous popular religious sensibilities and devotion to sacred images while at the same time implicitly trying to contain them, weaving their distinct local historical threads seamlessly into the fabric of a global Catholic history.

The unconventional nature of Holy See diplomats rests in the composite character of their ecclesiastical role as the Pope's representatives and their legal diplomatic status and commencement to ordinary diplomatic practice. Holy See diplomacy is a form of conduct created by a set of mixed secular and religious standards in which agents are guided by practices. I locate this argument within a classical English School and a conventional understanding of practice, diplomacy, and agency while incorporating understandings of the diplomat as a stranger. The article situates a Holy See diplomat's mode of agency as a hybrid one by nature, located at the intersections of political and religious modes of agency and substantial and relational conceptions of international politics. I probe this conceptual framework of hybrid agency by analysing episodes involving papal diplomats in turmoil-ridden historical episodes, and correspondence with informed agents.

Throughout the Middle Ages, in both Constantinople and the West, the installation of relics connected to Christ, martyrs, saints, and the Holy Land was used to augment the status and power of churches and chapels. This essay explores the transmission of relics from the Holy Land to Constantinople and Europe, emphasizing the importance of these relics in enhancing the connections to the Holy Land. The examination of medieval writings and relics reveals the wealth of Constantinople and the veneration that crusaders, pilgrims, and religious leaders held for the objects that were taken from the East. Military conquest brought most of the relics from the East to Constantinople, and a burst of church construction during the emperor Constantine’s reign in the 4th century AD provided the housing for these holy objects. In later centuries, gifting became the most common means of transfer of the objects from Byzantium to the West, further spreading the relics among Europe. The significance of these physical links to the Holy Land is also sometimes reinforced by the architecture of the structures in which the relics were housed and worshiped. The final section of the essay examines the relics installed in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, built by King Louis IX of France to house the precious objects he obtained from a financially weak Constantinople in the thirteenth century. Beyond the Sainte-Chapelle’s aesthetic brilliance, the architecture served to help connect the chapel to the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and Louis IX to King Solomon himself. The dedication of the chapel and its function as a reliquary for the holy objects of the Passion also signified the designation of Paris as the new Holy Land in the thirteenth century.

where hung not his coat of arms topped by the triple crown, the symbol of regal power, but a dark red drape with a white rectangle, he appeared in his standard outfit of the plain white cassock, introduced himself as Bishop of Rome, asked the people gathered below him to pray for him before he bestowed his blessing urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world. Twenty-four hours after being elected, he insisted on going back to the international residence for clergy in Via della Scrofa, where he had stayed before the conclave in order to pack his bags and settle his bill in person. A photo seen around the world showed him dressed in white, waiting at the reception desk while the clerk made out his bill. The pope from Argentina did not to move into the lavish papal apartment in the apostolic palace. Instead, he decided to live in the Santa Marta residence located in Vatican City. They were portents of a different kind of papacy. In short, they indicated the end of the imperial papacy and of the imperial Church. What has happened since Pope Francis election? My own take is that there have been three ongoing retrievals under Pope Francis: the retrieval of the real meaning and practice of the Christian faith, the retrieval of the vision and promise of Vatican II, and the retrieval of the perspective and insights of liberation theology.