It was only 27 years ago that the United States recognized the Holy See (the governing body of the Catholic church) as a state and agreed to exchange ambassadors. In making the decision, Ronald Reagan went against a long history of US opinion against recognizing a religious institution as a state.
But for Reagan, the shared agenda with the Pope regarding communism was a good reason to break with prior legal opinions and the US tradition of separation of church and state. Part of the deal, according to Pope John Paul II biographer, Carl Bernstein, was active engagement against family planning and abortion by the US in international forums.
Diplomatic recognition meant exchanging ambassadors. For Reagan and the two Bushes appointing conservative Catholics who toed the Vatican line on abortion, family planning, gays and stem cells was a piece of cake. Clinton was respectful and appointed first Ray Flynn, the Boston anti-choice mayor who had supported him and then Lindy Boggs, a pro-life Catholic member of Congress. No mind, the tension between Clinton and the Vatican was palpable, especially around the Clinton administration about face on reproductive health in the UN.
Now, it is time for the Obama administration to appoint an ambassador and if early reports are true, the administration has taken, at the informal level, an even less conciliatory approach to who should represent the US. It has been reported that the administration suggested to the Vatican that Caroline Kennedy, a prochoice Catholic, might be considered. The administration also reportedly suggested Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine law professor who is solidly anti-abortion but supported Obama. Kmiec asserted that Obama was actually likely to do more to prevent the need for abortion by supporting pregnancy prevention and economic support for women and children than John McCain. AP reports that the Vatican has indicated that these and other suggested ambassadors are “unacceptable.”
There is no doubt that the administration will find an ambassador that the Vatican finds acceptable. The Vatican is not as important as it was during the downfall of communism and the new Pope is not an international rock star. Why offend unnecessarily?
At the same time, one need wonder whether the US routinely allows countries to decide who our ambassador should be? And whether our ambassador’s job is to represent the positions of the US to the Vatican or to represent the Vatican’s views to a president who presumably needs educating. It was most certainly Ray Flynn’s approach. He spent more time trying to convince Clinton to follow the Vatican line on stem cell research and abortion than vice versa.
Conflict between the Vatican and the US is likely to emerge this year which will mark the 15h Anniversary of the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development where the Vatican faced stunning defeats as an international consensus was achieved on a new paradigm for reproductive health which placed women’s needs and rights front and center. While the Conference document was limited in that it fell short of recognizing the need for safe and legal abortion, it refused to accept Vatican attempts to enshrine so called conscience clauses into the document and was forthright in accepting family planning for all individuals, the rights of adolescents to confidential health care and the importance of condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV.
The Bush years witnessed what Amnesty International called an “unholy alliance” between the US and the Vatican designed to roll back the advances made in 1994. Now the US is back and the Vatican stands almost alone in the UN. At the just concluded annual UN Commission on Population and Development meeting, US representatives made strong statements in support of reproductive health rights as human rights and in favor of comprehensive reproductive health care for women around the world.
Perhaps the Vatican is looking for a US ambassador it can count on to once again represent its views to the administration?
Perhaps it is time to raise once again the question of whether the Vatican is a state, a religion or both and how the US and the UN should relate to the Vatican. Any number of experts on international law suggests that the Vatican does not meet enough of the criteria to be recognized as a state. It has no permanent population; the thousand or so citizens are only citizens as long as they are employed by the Vatican (and of course the fact that there are no more than a dozen women or children among those thousand goes unmentioned.) The Vatican of course counters that it is recognized as a state by over 160 countries.
For Catholics, the question of the Vatican’s role in the UN is complex. There is a certain pride in having privilege and in the positions the Vatican takes on peace, poverty and development. We Catholics do like being special and some of us still think we are the one true religion. At the same time, as the Un has moved into the 21st Century and now deals with questions of personal freedom and more directly with health, and takes positions most Catholics agree with from support for family planning and condoms to prevent HIV, some worry that our views are not represented by the Vatican. Is the Vatican a state? If so what kind of state? Democratic of course not, accountable to a constituency? No. Does it speak for Catholics or for God?
Stay tuned. You are going to be hearing those questions more frequently asked in the UN and in the US over the next four years.
