The name Myron Taylor will surely not ring bells in the memory of most Americans. But I remember him as the man Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed in 1939 as his personal representative at the Vatican.
FDR knew better than to propose Taylor as ambassador. That nomination would have stirred up widespread anti-Catholic feeling in this country. And it would not have gained the necessary approval from the U.S. Senate.
At the same time, the president recognized the geopolitical significance of the Vatican, and thus the importance of having a contact with the Pope and Vatican officials. Taylor was to serve ten years in this position, at a critical time in world history.
As a boy, I took note of this appointment with interest. I recall being surprised to discover that Taylor was a Protestant. Could not that role be better carried out by a Catholic, I naively wondered.
Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter followed FDR’s example and chose representatives at the Vatican. In 1984 the position finally took on ambassadorial rank. It was Ronald Reagan who made this happen and, by then, with no significant opposition.
Since that time, the U.S. has had several ambassadors to the Vatican who have been Catholics: Ray Flynn, Lindy Boggs, and the outgoing ambassador Mary Ann Glendon.
The title of ambassador gives its holder more prestige, if nothing else. How much actual clout this person exercises inevitably depends on many different factors.
These thoughts have arisen in response to President Obama’s recent nomination of a new ambassador to the Vatican. He is Miguel Díaz, a professor of theology at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
This appointment makes you wonder how Barack Obama found him. He is far from being a household name. I dare say that few Americans, even news junkies like me, will have known of him.
The question of how the president chose him, of course, is political, and the answer derives from a political connection. During the presidential campaign, Díaz was a member of candidate Obama’s Catholic advisory committee.
What needs no explanation is the new ambassador’s Hispanic heritage. In fact, he was born in Cuba, lived for three years in Spain, and grew up in Miami. He represents the fastest-growing segment of the Catholic Church in this country.
Díaz’s nomination comes as yet another sign of change in this country. By reason of his ethnic background he will bring to the post an awareness of the needs of the Spanish-speaking community and of the resources that it offers to the church and the nation.
He is also a theologian, a trade that makes him unique among those who have represented the U.S. at the Vatican. His reputation as a theologian seems largely limited to his colleagues in that profession. Still, when he talks with the pope, it will be a unique situation of one theologian dealing with another.
If he turns out to have good diplomatic skills, he can be helpful to President Obama. After all, our new president is still something of an unknown quantity at the Vatican, although he has already received some good notices from the pope and other church officials there.
In discussion of the new envoy’s views, the subject of abortion will inevitably arise. However, whatever views Professor Díaz has on the subject are not widely known.
Fortunately, the Vatican has refrained from criticizing Obama for his approach to issues concerning abortion. Though the pope surely disagrees with Obama’s approach to the subject, I would like to think that the pope (contrary to some American bishops) will at least respect the president’s efforts to make abortion rarer.
John Allen, the best informed Vaticanologist among U.S. journalists, sees Díaz as about to be “the most visible Hispanic Catholic from the United States on the Roman stage.” In addition, Allen sees the new ambassador as representing “another constituency that sometimes feels invisible, or misunderstood, in Rome: the moderate to liberal camp.”
For an appraisal of Díaz by another Hispanic, I consulted Maria Teresa Dávila, Professor of Christian Ethics at Andover Newton. “In the past, being a public theologian did not seem to be his focus,” she says.
She would like to see Díaz step out of the academic arena and assume a more popular role. “I hope he is able to vocalize in new and powerful ways the potential of the Hispanic presence in the American Catholic Church.”
If the Vatican keeps this fact in mind, I would hope for the appointment of more Hispanic bishops here. Thus far, only a few dioceses are led by bishops from Spanish-speaking backgrounds.
The days of Myron Taylor are long gone, but the initiatives he took as the first presidential representative of our government at the Vatican perhaps remain instructive. Here’s hoping that Miguel Díaz will live up to the expectations of President Obama, and the Hispanic community that has hailed his appointment.