"Sometimes I feel like the last ambassador to the Republic of
Venice."
These words, pronounced by a European ambassador to the Holy
See, testify to the stress that both sex abuse scandals and the economic crisis
are creating in diplomatic circles in Rome.
Being appointed ambassador
to the Vatican still gives a very prestigious status.
But in recent
months it has also made the appointees feel a whiff of uncertainty about
their future.
The tiny republic of Venice lasted till 1797, when
Napoleon invaded the city and swallowed its territories and
institutions.
The comparison between that experience and the Vatican may
sound an inappropriate and exaggerated one.
The number of states eager
to have diplomatic relations with papal Rome is growing: so far there
are 179.
Latest arrivals: Russia and Malaysia.
No surprise.
Back in
1831, Edward Hannegan,
a senator for Indiana, said that the US needed diplomatic relations
because papal Rome served as an "emporium of the intelligence in
Europe".
Furthermore, and rightly, the Vatican is considered the
permanent factor in Italian politics.
But rumours about the
difficulty of redefining the approach to today's Holy See are very
telling.
In a secularised Europe, with the numbers of the Catholic
faithful shrinking dramatically and a worsening economic situation, the
whispered question from some governments is: is it still worthwhile,
politically and economically, keeping an embassy to the Holy See?
Here,
in western Europe, the heart of Christianity, the crisis of Catholicism
is an impressive one.
Even in Germany, the pontiff's heartland, in 2010
for the first time the number of Catholics who left the church was
higher than that of baptisms: 181,193 left Catholicism, 170,000 were
baptised.
More generally, state-church relations are painfully
strained.
And the pressure of public opinion to take a tougher stance
against the Vatican is expected to grow in coming months: the Irish case
is there as an alarm call.
Such a trend could lead, if not to shutting
some embassies down, to the downgrading of their status and financial
and political weight. In some ways, it has happened already with the US
embassy to the Holy See, a traditional vanguard of western developments.
After
the end of the George W Bush administration, the Vatican didn't want to
agree to a Democratic ambassador who might be thought pro-choice.
This
is why, in confidential discussions, some names were jointly put aside,
among them Caroline Kennedy,
considered pro-abortion by the Holy See.
At a certain point, there was
the risk that no Democrat could match the Vatican standard: that would
have created a diplomatic incident.
Then the choice of Cuban American theologian Miguel Diaz
arrived: an anti-abortion Catholic but a Democrat.
As a consequence of
this power struggle and the ensuing compromise, however, the US embassy
to the Holy See in Rome has lost much of its past strategic profile.
The
appointment displays the looming tensions between the Democratic
administration and US bishops and the Vatican; and the impossibility of
picking a politically strong figure without creating more
misunderstandings.
Furthermore, following the "holy alliance" between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II against communism,
and after the common fight of the west against Islamic fundamentalism,
the international agenda of the Vatican is now less focused.
While
he admits that Catholics today are a "creative minority" in the western
world, many unexpected consequences could spring from this new
assumption.
Communism, the historic ideological enemy, is over. Now the
adversary is not hostility but indifference to religion.
That's why in
recent years the Catholic church has been criticising, for instance,
Halloween: it views Halloween as a symbol of subtle and dangerous
secular values opposed to Christian ones; and it fears competition from
its growing popularity.
Against such a political and cultural
background, what could happen?
Nobody can predict.
But "I ask myself,"
wondered recently an ambassador to the Holy See, "if in 10 years' time
there will still be an embassy of my country to the papal court."