Rice Denied Audience with Pope

From the Corriere della Sera:

Rice Denied Audience with Pope
Disagreements over foreign policy behind refusal.

US Secretary of State requested meeting in August. Told that Benedict XVI was “on holiday”.
The latest request was made during the summer. The US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice indicated to the Vatican that she urgently needed to meet Benedict XVI. She was on her way back into the viper’s nest of the Middle East and it would have been no bad thing to meet her counterparts with the credentials of a papal audience. Ms Rice had hoped that the audience could be fixed for early August at Castelgandolfo, the papal summer residence, when Benedict XVI returned from Lorenzago in the Dolomites, but she was told the Pope was on holiday. She insisted but to no avail. Vatican diplomats were adamant and “Benedict XVI is on holiday” continued to be the official reply.

As far as we know, Ms Rice was able to discuss the Middle East, and Lebanon in particular, during a telephone conversation with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. In early August, the Vatican secretary of state was on a visit to America for the annual meeting of the Knights of Columbus in Nashville. But the failure to arrange a meeting between Benedict XVI and Ms Rice has taken on a significance perhaps beyond the intentions of the Holy See. It has been seen as confirming the divergence of views on the Bush administration’s Middle East initiatives and growing friction on Iraq and relations with Iran. The Vatican believes that the United States may be taking too lightly the issue of guarantees for religious minorities in the new Iraqi constitution and has said so to the government in Baghdad. In reply, it was told that threats and violence against Christians are no more severe than those experienced by other minorities. The Americans were also approached but they replied that troops were unable to maintain full control of the territory and had difficulty in protecting non-Muslims.

On Iran, the Vatican is known to detest the truculent anti-Semitism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but regards another preventive war as a disaster. Despite all this, US-Vatican relations continue to be very good. Information and assessments on hot zones is exchanged all the time, even though the strategies remain different, and moral issues continue to bring the Catholic Church and the Bush administration together. The problem is that foreign policy is an constant source of discord and Ms Rice is not one of the Vatican’s favourite interlocutors. When contacts were first made for her abortive encounter with the Pope, it was explained that President Bush was also pressing for the meeting. His talks in the Vatican on 9 June with Benedict XVI had gone well and the US secretary of state’s encounter could have been a continuation. In fact, for Ms Rice to have obtained an audience on the lake at Castelgandolfo would have required willingness on the Vatican’s part, which was not the case. In August, the Pope tends to shun talks with politicians, with very few exceptions. A papal vacation, it was thought, was a good excuse for avoiding a meeting that was seen as not essential and could have created confusion or misunderstanding in international public opinion, above all in the Middle East.

No one will say so officially but the refusal may also have been prompted by Ms Rice’s stance in 2003, when she was Mr Bush’s national security adviser. On the eve of the Iraqi conflict, it was Ms Rice who said bluntly that she did not understand the Vatican’s anti-war stance. She treated John Paul II’s envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, with a coolness that bordered on disrespect when he was sent to Washington on 2 March 2003 on a desperate mission to avert military intervention. Clearly, the incident has not been forgotten.

Article in Italian
Massimo Franco English translation by Giles Watson www.watson.it