AND HAD BENEDICT BEEN POPE AT THE TIME...:

“So I Sent In My Resignation...”: Mary Ann Glendon, the scholarly, profound United States Ambassador to the Holy See during the past year, resigned her post this past week to allow Barack Obama, the new US president, to choose a new US ambassador to the Vatican to his liking. Now Glendon reflects on her year in Rome in an interview with our correspondent, Roman journalist Alberto Carosa. Glendon’s reflections give an insight into the work of diplomacy in Rome at the highest level (Albert Carosa, Inside The Vatican)

Can you also elaborate now about what you see as the common points between the Vatican and your country?

Ambassador Glendon: For the past several years, there has been a strong correspondence between the views of the U.S. government and the Holy See on the importance of strengthening the global moral consensus against terror (especially against the use of religion as a justification for violence); promoting human rights (especially religious freedom); fostering inter-religious dialogue; and working for peace in the Middle East and other troubled areas of the world. And of course President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI shared a common outlook on a wide range of social and cultural issues.

There is another area of common concern, however, where it seems to me that neither the U.S. nor the Holy See receives the recognition they deserve. I’m referring to their commitment to the relief of poverty, hunger, and disease. On those fronts, a natural partnership has grown up between the United States, as the world’s largest and most generous donor of humanitarian aid, and the Holy See, which oversees the world’s largest network of health care, educational, and relief agencies.

That community of interest intensified over the past eight years thanks to President Bush’s energetic embrace of one of the most important political ideas of the late 20th century, namely, that social services can often be delivered more efficiently, effectively and humanely through the mediating structures of civil society, than by government acting directly. President Bush has said he considers his initiatives with faith-based institutions as one of the “crowning achievements’ of his presidency, a presidency that saw the U.S. government double its aid to Latin America, quadruple it to Africa, and triple it worldwide. Through creative partnerships between government and faith-based organizations, America has provided the world with successful models for getting official aid to its intended beneficiaries with low transaction costs and high accountability.

These initiatives, permitting participating religious groups to maintain their principles and identity, are very much in the spirit of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est ("God Is Love") where he wrote that “The state that would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing the suffering person—every person—needs: namely love and personal concern." The notion that charity is merely a social service, he pointed out, “demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human” (DCE, 28b).

And what about the differences between Rome and Washington? Will they be overcome one day?

Ambassador Glendon: By the time I arrived last year, there was no disposition to revisit the major difference that had arisen in recent years--that over the decision to take military action against the regime in Iraq.

...there'd have been no difference over the war.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2009 8:58 PM