This Day in Diplomatic History (U.S. and Vatican Establish Full Relations)

January 10, 1984—The United States and the Vatican brought to an end nearly two hundred years of contacts that ranged from semi-official to nonexistent by announcing that they would be establishing full diplomatic relations. The move also capped nearly four decades of American Presidents’ attempts, amid lingering anti-Catholic domestic attitudes, to create a more substantial point of contact between one of the world’s superpowers and an organization with significant moral influence in Europe and beyond.

From 1797 to the late 1860s, the U.S. kept a consulate in the Papal States. For the last two decades in this period, though it did not exchange ambassadors with the Vatican, America maintained diplomatic relations.

All of this came to an end in August 1867, when Congress prohibited the funding of any diplomat to the Vatican. For years afterward, virtually no sovereign basis would have existed for this in any case, as the unification of Italy resulted in the loss of most of the territory in the Papal States, as well as the pontiff’s temporal power.

That only changed when the government of Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty in 1929, when the government of Benito Mussolini recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City—a territory of approximately 100 acres—and the pope as its temporal ruler.

A decade later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted to communicate more closely with the Vatican and the U.S. in closer communication. The motive for the move was pragmatic, not idealistic: while no rabid anti-Catholic, FDR once told two members of his administration, Leo Crowley and Henry Morgenthau: “This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance."

But, with war having broken out in Europe, he needed a neutral listening post. The Vatican, which for the last quarter century had made diplomatic overtures to regimes it detested in order to maintain churches in those countries, fit the bill.

But how was Roosevelt going to accomplish this? The U.S. was only a decade past the decline of the Ku Klux Klan as a powerful and frightening force in much of the country, and Al Smith’s Presidential bid in 1928 ran into a storm of anti-Catholic sentiment.

So FDR, foxy politician that he was, hit on a stratagem: on Christmas Eve 1939, the same day he announced he’d be sending a personal representative, Myron Taylor (an Episcopalian) to the Vatican, he coupled it with a statement that he’d be pursuing closer relations with key officials from the Protestant and Jewish faiths. Taylor still, however, did not formally have the title of ambassador, as the post would have required a vote by Congress that FDR, with a weaker majority than at any time since he took office, might not have won.

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, deciding it was a good time to establish full diplomatic relations, announced the appointment of General Mark Clark as ambassador. He ran into the very political hailstorm that FDR had so adroitly avoided.

Opposition to the appointment had nothing to do with Clark but with the “recognition” of a religion, and the administration did not promote well the idea that he was recognizing a temporal authority, albeit once drastically reduced in power. The time was still not right to take on fears of anti-Catholicism: Paul Blanshard’s polemic, American Freedom and Catholic Power, a dark warning about the dangers of the religion to the First Amendment, had spent seven months on the New York Times bestseller list only two years before. Truman dropped the appointment and the idea of full diplomatic relations.

It took another three decades for diplomatic relations finally to be achieved. Having won the White House with the thinnest of margins, John F. Kennedy could not pursue the initiative without bringing to the fore the very fears about his faith that he had been at such pains to quell during the campaign.

In fact, he was temperamentally and politically inclined to avoid this at all costs. His entire education took place in schools more populated by Boston Brahmins than his own co-religionists, and he was somewhat detached from Catholicism. As President, his rejection of aid to parochial schools did not endear him to the American church hierarchy.

It took the son of an Irish Catholic father who had embraced the faith of his Protestant mother to establish full diplomatic relations with the Vatican. As with FDR and Truman, Ronald Reagan did so for reasons of realpolitik. With his attempt to undermine the Soviet Union at its height, he sought to further relations with Pope John Paul II, the most visible advocate of nonviolent opposition to Communism in Europe.

Reagan moved rapidly and, with the help of a Congress effectively in GOP control (Republicans had an absolute voting majority in the Senate and a controlling authority in the House, with the help of so-called “boll weevil Democrats”), he pushed through legislation repealing the 1867 legislation. The only governmental body that had qualms about the issue, in fact, was the office of his own State Department.

The world has changed several times over since the early days of the republic, with the American government and even the supposedly unchanging Roman Catholic Church altering their attitudes over the years. Nevertheless, in some quarters old fears don’t die, despite the facts on the ground. Witness the hysterical humanist screed on “Foreign Political Interference . . . Vatican Style.” Tomorrow, in the “Quote of the Day,” I’ll deal with another, closer to home.