Is This the Vaticans Twilight?, by Massimo Franco, The Guardian, August 5, 2011

Is This the Vatican's Twilight?

By Massimo Franco
The Guardian
August 5, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/aug/05/vatican-ambassadors-holy-see

The Vatican's St Peter's Square. Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Images

"Sometimes I feel like the last ambassador to the Republic of Venice." These words, pronounced by a European ambassador to the Holy See, testify to the stress that both sex abuse scandals and the economic crisis are creating in diplomatic circles in Rome. Being appointed ambassador to the Vatican still gives a very prestigious status. But in recent months it has also made the appointees feel a whiff of uncertainty about their future.

The tiny republic of Venice lasted till 1797, when Napoleon invaded the city and swallowed its territories and institutions. The comparison between that experience and the Vatican may sound an inappropriate and exaggerated one. The number of states eager to have diplomatic relations with papal Rome is growing: so far there are 179. Latest arrivals: Russia and Malaysia. No surprise. Back in 1831, Edward Hannegan, a senator for Indiana, said that the US needed diplomatic relations because papal Rome served as an "emporium of the intelligence in Europe". Furthermore, and rightly, the Vatican is considered the permanent factor in Italian politics.

But rumours about the difficulty of redefining the approach to today's Holy See are very telling. In a secularised Europe, with the numbers of the Catholic faithful shrinking dramatically and a worsening economic situation, the whispered question from some governments is: is it still worthwhile, politically and economically, keeping an embassy to the Holy See? Here, in western Europe, the heart of Christianity, the crisis of Catholicism is an impressive one. Even in Germany, the pontiff's heartland, in 2010 for the first time the number of Catholics who left the church was higher than that of baptisms: 181,193 left Catholicism, 170,000 were baptised.

More generally, state-church relations are painfully strained. And the pressure of public opinion to take a tougher stance against the Vatican is expected to grow in coming months: the Irish case is there as an alarm call. Such a trend could lead, if not to shutting some embassies down, to the downgrading of their status and financial and political weight. In some ways, it has happened already with the US embassy to the Holy See, a traditional vanguard of western developments.

After the end of the George W Bush administration, the Vatican didn't want to agree to a Democratic ambassador who might be thought pro-choice. This is why, in confidential discussions, some names were jointly put aside, among them Caroline Kennedy, considered pro-abortion by the Holy See. At a certain point, there was the risk that no Democrat could match the Vatican standard: that would have created a diplomatic incident. Then the choice of Cuban American theologian Miguel Diaz arrived: an anti-abortion Catholic but a Democrat. As a consequence of this power struggle and the ensuing compromise, however, the US embassy to the Holy See in Rome has lost much of its past strategic profile.

The appointment displays the looming tensions between the Democratic administration and US bishops and the Vatican; and the impossibility of picking a politically strong figure without creating more misunderstandings. Furthermore, following the "holy alliance" between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II against communism, and after the common fight of the west against Islamic fundamentalism, the international agenda of the Vatican is now less focused.

While he admits that Catholics today are a "creative minority" in the western world, many unexpected consequences could spring from this new assumption. Communism, the historic ideological enemy, is over. Now the adversary is not hostility but indifference to religion. That's why in recent years the Catholic church has been criticising, for instance, Halloween: it views Halloween as a symbol of subtle and dangerous secular values opposed to Christian ones; and it fears competition from its growing popularity. Against such a political and cultural background, what could happen? Nobody can predict. But "I ask myself," wondered recently an ambassador to the Holy See, "if in 10 years' time there will still be an embassy of my country to the papal court."