I was in the shower tonight and a thought occurred to me. I wondered if the US Ambassador (or any ambassadors) to the Vatican can be Catholic?
I would think that he/she would NOT be allowed to be Catholic. It’s a conflict of interest. It’s like the US Ambassador to Russia belonging to the Putin Fan Club.
I supposed it is in theory a more “cooperative” than confrontational post.
I looked on Wikipedia, and apparently every US Ambassador to date (starting in 1984) has been a Catholic.
After reading this article, it appears that the Vatican does not require them to be a Catholic, but does require them to be pro-life, which has caused difficulty in the Obama administration.
The Holy See (Vatican City does not send/recieve diplomats) is unusually frivoulus when it comes to accepting ambassadors. We don’t normally have problems like this, but then again I don’t think we’ve ever tried appointing a Jew or a woman to Saudi Arabia.
Doesn’t look like the holy see (which I believe is technically who the ambassadors are to, even though the state is the vaticain city) is as such REQUIRING the ambassadors to have a pro life viewpoint. They’re just making it clear that that is what they prefer, and no doubt other states do similar things.
The other day, various high ranking UK catholics sent a hilarious open letter to the UK government basically saying that we should stop the gay marriage proposals, because it would lead to catholics being fired from jobs when they refused to deal with those with gay marriages - because others would think said people refusing to deal with gays were bigots. This was said without irony!
In general the vaticain is trying to increase its diplomatic power to push its opinions on the world. Had it acheived much during say, the holocaust, perhaps it would deserve power as a state. As it is it deserves nothing and frankly if I were in charge of any country I would refuse to have any diplomatic relations with it.
But this is the straight dope message board, and so I feel I must let readers know about an interesting thing that they PROBABLY don’t know about. Oddly enough, the vaticain ain’t the only soverign catholic organisation that’s based in rome, a member of the UN and so forth. There’s actually another one which I may as well introduce you to: Soverign Military Order of Malta.
As well as being part of the UN, that has diplomatic recognition from loads and loads of countries. Want to know a country that doesn’t recognise it? The United States. Perhaps it’s time to recognise the first amendment and stop recognising the vaticain as well. Entirely up to you, just my suggestion
Actually, Malta had to revamp its institutions in order to apply and be accepted into the EU. Whitewash if you want, but still, if names weren’t important in politics, politicians wouldn’t make such a fuss about them.
??? The Sovereign Military Order of Malta isn’t in the EU, it only has observer status. And it basically has little to do with Malta, although it now has a lease on a castle in Malta.
Count me surprised-I know that the Italian Government prefers US ambassadors to be non-catholic-that eliminates many points of friction…even though the RC Church is the Vatican.
It’s also forbidden for the same person to be accredited as ambassador to both the Holy See and Italian Republic at the same time, but not for both ambassadors to work out of the same embassy.
