President Obama’s Faithful Helpers

by Anne Hendershott

President Obama’s decision to close the Vatican embassy—moving the ambassador and his staff into shared office space in the building housing the U. S. Embassy to Italy—is viewed by many, including several former ambassadors to the Vatican, as yet another attempt by the Obama administration to further marginalize the influence of the Holy See.

While the Obama administration cites security concerns in an email to the Daily Caller (after the September, 11, 2012 attack on our embassy in Benghazi, Libya) as the reason for the closure, James Nicholson, the ambassador to the Vatican from 2001 until 2005, described the move as a “massive downgrade of U.S.-Vatican ties … an insult to American Catholics and to the Vatican,” telling a writer for the National Catholic Reporter that the move is “turning the embassy into a stepchild of the embassy to Italy.”

Nicholson’s sentiments were echoed by other former ambassadors to the Vatican including Francis Rooney, Mary Ann Glendon, Raymond Flynn and Thomas Melady.  And although current Ambassador Kenneth Hackett, a recent Obama appointee, defended the move by suggesting that other countries operate under a similar space-sharing arrangement, former Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon dismissed such a defense saying that the importance of the relationship between the U. S. and the Vatican “merits its own location and profile.”

The criticisms of the embassy closure have come from former ambassadors from both sides of the political aisle.  While Glendon, Nicholson, Rooney and Melady were appointed by Republican presidents, Raymond Flynn, one of the most vocal critics of the closure, was appointed by President Clinton.

In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Flyn said “it’s not just those who bomb churches and kill Catholics in the Middle East who are our antagonists but it’s also those who restrict our religious freedoms and want to close down our embassy to the Holy See…. There’s no diplomatic or political benefit to the United States.”

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 Crisis Magazine began in 1982 as a response to the crisis of faith in the Catholic Church and soon broadened it’s purview to include the crisis to faith in the public square. While signs of hope have been observed in recent decades thanks to the effective and inspired leadership of Blessed John Paul II and Benedict XVI, much remains to be done. Indeed, Pope Francis reminds us of this often.

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