Embassy Vatican: Some Demystifications

A change of presidential administrations typically leads to changes in U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad, especially at the ambassadorial level. This, in turn, leads to speculations, some of them zany, about the post of U.S. ambassador to the Holy See (typically mislabeled as “U.S. ambassador to the Vatican”). Herewith, then, some clarifications and demystifications about this position.

The entity that sends and receives ambassadors is not “the Vatican,” but the Holy See. “The Vatican” means several things. “The Vatican” can be a stand-in for the independent micro-state known as “Vatican City State” (Stato della Città del Vaticano), created by the 1929 Lateran Pacts. It can refer to the complex of buildings adjacent to the Papal Basilica of St. Peter’s. But the entity that sends and receives ambassadors—the entity with which the United States has full diplomatic exchange at the ambassadorial level—is the Holy See.

And what is the “Holy See”? It is the embodiment, for purposes of international law and diplomacy, of the ministry of the Bishop of Rome as universal pastor of the Catholic Church. The Holy See has had what is known technically as international legal personality since at least 1500, meaning that the Holy See was exchanging diplomatic representation with other sovereign actors (kings, princes, etc.) long before the modern nation-state existed. The Holy See continued to be recognized as an international diplomatic actor even when the Bishop of Rome controlled no sovereign territory of his own between 1870 and 1929.

The Holy See thus embodies the fact that the Bishop of Rome, as universal pastor of the Church, is a sovereign (if of a distinctive sort) who is not subject to the authority of any other sovereign.

In U.S. State Department shorthand, the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See (which marks its fortieth anniversary this year) is referred to as “Embassy Vatican.” But the relationship is United States :: Holy See, not United States :: Vatican City State.

The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See thus represents one sovereign actor—the United States of America—to another sovereign actor, the Holy See. The U.S. ambassador’s role is to convey and explain his or her government’s views to the officials of the Holy See and, in turn, to explain the Holy See’s concerns to the United States Government in matters of mutual concern involving world politics, diplomacy, and international public life.

The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See does not represent the Catholic Church in the United States to the Church’s central authority. The bishops of the United States, represented by the president and vice-president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, meet regularly with the Pope and the senior officials of the Roman Curia to deal with American ecclesiastical matters. That is their responsibility, not the ambassador’s. Any U.S. ambassador to the Holy See who tried to exert influence over (or within) the relationship between the Pope and the Curia, on the one hand, and the Church in the United States, on the other, would be quickly declared persona non grata by the Holy See and sent home.

The notion now being bruited by some online and social-media chatterboxes—that the incoming Trump Administration’s nominee to Embassy Vatican should, among other things, explain the truths about the Catholic Church in the United States to the Pope and the officials of the Roman Curia—is thus a complete non-starter, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship in question.

What can the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See do when the administration he or she represents has sharply different views about issues in world politics than the Pope and his diplomats? A lot, actually. The late Ambassador Lindy Boggs, who represented the second Clinton Administration, and Ambassador Callista Gingrich, who represented the first Trump Administration, did excellent work by concentrating on issues on which the two sovereign entities agreed: combatting human trafficking; religious freedom on the international level; emergent moral questions in science and technology; education and health care for women and girls in developing countries. In a different situation, where the U.S. administration involved and the Holy See were, on most issues, more closely aligned, Ambassador James Nicholson did the Holy See and the world a real service by organizing a conference in Rome that exposed the scientific falsehoods being perpetrated by the “anti-GMO-foods” movement.

Must the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See be a Catholic? No. And it might get the State Department to take Embassy Vatican more seriously if the ambassador were a career Foreign Service officer who understood the Holy See’s role in world affairs and could reflect that back to the hidebound secularists who dominate Foggy Bottom.