New Emissary to the Pope

Although the Vatican is not a country but a city-state--and at 108.7 acres, a tiny one--it has its uses in international diplomacy. For rising young careerists, assignment to the Holy See* is a welcome opportunity to develop the graces that they will carry to larger posts. For senior men, it is often a final and extraordinary experience before their retirement from public life.

All 65 countries represented at the Vatican today--among them the Moslem United Arab Republic and Communist Cuba--find the papal corridors not only a valuable listening station but a strategic position to catch the ear of the leader of 614 million Roman Catholics. The U.S. has not had a man on the spot since 1950, when Myron C. Taylor, President Roosevelt's personal representative to the Holy See, retired. Last week, with the arrival of Henry Cabot Lodge in Rome, official relations with the papacy were resumed--at least in part.

Because of a time-honored American principle, separation of church and state, Lodge's status at the Vatican is deliberately ambiguous. The White House has cautiously cast him as a man with President Richard M. Nixon's "special confidence" who will not reside in Rome but will simply call on the Pope from time to time. Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler described Lodge as Nixon's "personal representative to the

Holy See," just as Taylor was called. But the Vatican's Secretariat of State dislikes that phrase because it implies a special papal accommodation to the U.S., and has thus far referred to Lodge as the U.S. "Ambassador-at-large to the Holy See."

Useful Intelligence. Whatever the semantic distinctions involved, Lodge's unannounced function seems clear enough. Not only will he be able to keep an ear cocked for the useful intelligence that passes through the Holy See, but --more important, perhaps--he can tip the U.S. to any impending Vatican moves in such sensitive areas as Third World development and international peace. Conceivably, the Vatican might also help Washington find answers to some of the U.S.'s most troublesome problems, such as peace in Viet Nam and the fate of U.S. prisoners there.

Much of the Vatican's prestige as a listening post for diplomats grows out of its own long experience in the diplomatic arts, going back to the 5th century, when the first pontifical emissary was sent to Constantinople to represent the Pope at the Eastern Roman imperial court. Modern diplomacy came with the Renaissance and Reformation. In 1815, Rome's envoys achieved considerable sway in Europe when the Vatican delegate to the Congress of Vienna, Cardinal Consalvi, won a remarkable concession from the Congress: henceforth a papal nuncio (ambassador) would be the doyen of the resident diplomatic corps wherever he was accredited.

Even today, 33 nuncios, 29 pro-nuncios and 16 apostolic delegates represent the Holy See abroad. Nuncios and pro-nuncios, sometimes to the distress of local hierarchies, often deal in church matters as well as with the host state. Apostolic delegates--nondiplomatic personnel assigned to countries where the Pope has no official embassy, such as the U.S.--deal primarily in church matters, but can also be channels of other information to the Pope. Much of the information, reported back to Rome, may eventually reach diplomats accredited to the Holy See; other diplomats can only dream of such grass-roots contacts in their host countries.

Temporal Sovereign. It has been the principle of church-state separation that has qualified U.S.-Vatican ties since the nation's birth. In the mid-19th century, the U.S. did have a minister-resident in Rome, because the Pope was then a temporal sovereign, governing much of central Italy as well as Rome. Since then, however, U.S. relations with the Vatican have been less formal. In 1902, William Howard Taft, then Governor of the Philippines, successfully sought the help of Pope Leo XIII in getting Spanish friars in the islands to release their landholdings for redistribution to the Philippine people. Woodrow Wilson visited Pope Benedict XV on his way home from Versailles. But not until 1939 did President Roosevelt decide to send Protestant Taylor to the Vatican.

The Taylor mission proved useful; it may, for instance, have muted Vatican criticism of the U.S. lend-lease program to the Soviet Union. Yet experts on Vatican diplomacy insist that only through continuous representation, constantly keeping its national viewpoint before the Pope, can a nation reap any real benefit from Vatican representation. France, for instance, apparently strives assiduously to explain to the Vatican its position on the Middle East crisis in the hope of avoiding any public papal criticism. "You don't send a letter explaining or have some fellow stop by," argues Father Robert Graham, author of the book Vatican Diplomacy. "You have to be here ramming it through their minds day after day." So far, the U.S. seems unwilling to go quite that far.

*Vatican City has no foreign office, but the Holy See, the official seat of the Roman Catholic Church, does. Hence diplomatic emissaries are assigned not to "the Vatican" but to "the Holy See."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.