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an ambassador to a religious organization, a religious group, and in fact, why this religious group? How does that make sense for our nation? And that’s a very fair question. My mission is like a lot of other ambassadors in many ways. I’m not here to be a participant in arguments between the U.S. church and the Vatican or between people in the U.S. church or to be in the middle of Vatican politics or church politics. I’m here to promote United States’ policies; to work with the Vatican to see that we have success, that we can have success in places like Ukraine, that we can have success in trying to provide water and clean sanitation to places in Africa, and to coordinate with the Vatican on that effort.
And so you hear U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, the Vatican, how are they different? Well, the Holy See is like the universal government and the pope is in charge of that. And the Vatican is the hundred acres nearby that is the physical facility. A friend of mine from Minnesota said to me, “A hundred acres? My hunting camp is bigger than that.” I said, “Yeah, well, you don’t have St. Peter’s Basilica in the middle of your hunting camp.” And unlike the U.S. Embassy to Italy, we don’t do visas. I don’t have the priv- ilege of meeting with local businesses to try to promote business growth. It’s very much like a soft power. It is the Vatican, the Catholic church, but that church has over 180 ambas- sadors here to work with them. And part of the reason is because there are 600,000 sisters all over the world providing services, provid- ing care. In places where we may not have in- fluence, they do. In places where we do have influence and they may not, we work together.
And what you find is we don’t agree with the Vatican on every issue; they don’t agree with every issue on us. But we partner together on those issues we can. We work together to try to help provide that clean water and sanitation we talked about. And the old saying, “Sometimes one plus one really does equal three or four.”
People ask how is the relationship? It’s great. I was privileged to meet with the Pope to present him my credentials in early April. And the Pope and President Biden are very good friends. [The Pope asked] “And how’s my friend the President?” I said, “He’s great.” And I said, “The President said to tell you how much he appreciates your friendship.” He said, “That’s great.” I said, “I have a message here from the President in this envelope.” And he said, “Well, what does it say?” I said, “Well, if I read it, I’d be in big trouble. So this is for you from him.” And they do get along very well.
We work with - in addition to his Holiness - Cardinal Parolin, who is considered like the prime minister, the number two, the archbishop there who works on a lot of foreign policy. And he made a comment in a mag- azine interview recently, which I think sums up what we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to do it. The archbishop said, “We have a very, very good relationship with the United States. We don’t agree on everything. They bring us ideas that we look at and go, ‘Maybe not.’ We bring them ideas that they look at and say, ‘Doesn’t make sense for us.’ But we have a terrific relationship in working together to move those eighty percent of issues that we do agree on and that we do work on.”
One of the guests we have here today with us, Delia Gallagher from CNN, just got back on the plane last night from Kazakhstan with the Pope, who was there to try to bring together a number of different countries, a num- ber of different issues, and when they come back we sit down and we work together on those things. It’s a unique time in that when I sat with the Pope, he looked at me and he said, “You’re here at a really tough time.” And what he meant was Ukraine. And other challenges around the world. And you know, without talking out of school about his remarks, he said,
“I’m working so hard on this and I’m trying so hard to end the suffering and the killing.” He goes, “And I’m just not being able to get there every day but I’m going to keep trying.”