Maddie’s dissertation uncovers a surprising engine of Cold War diplomacy: the Catholic Church. While conventional accounts of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America focus on military coups, economic aid, or ideological battles, this project brings a different story to light—one in which sermons, synods, and pastoral letters helped shape the very meaning of American strategy. By pairing Machiavelli’s insights on religion and legitimacy with Gadamer’s philosophy of interpretation, the study introduces a new concept—recursive legitimation—to describe how power is built not just through tanks and treaties, but through the ongoing contest over moral meaning. Rather than treating policy as a static set of directives handed down from Washington, this dissertation approaches foreign policy as a living text—one that must be read, interpreted, challenged, and rearticulated by those it seeks to govern. Through close studies of Brazil and Chile, it shows how the Catholic Church didn’t simply react to U.S. intervention; it helped redefine what those interventions meant. Church leaders lent legitimacy to military regimes—or withdrew it—through theological arguments that carried real political weight. Their sermons shaped not just souls, but states.

In doing so, the project offers two major interventions. First, it reconceptualizes legitimacy as a recursive, interpretive process—something constantly made and remade in dialogue between states and moral authorities. Second, it offers a new way of studying foreign policy: not as monologue, but as dialogue; not as imposition, but as negotiation. At its heart, this dissertation asks us to rethink who really co-authors global order—and it shows that sometimes, the most important interventions come from the pulpit, not the Pentagon.