Archbishop Pietro Sambi jokes that he needed a new pair of glasses when he was assigned a diplomatic post in the United States after eight years in Jerusalem.“In the Holy Land, everything is small, and every small thing can become a big problem,” Sambi said in a recent interview.
“In the United States, everything is huge - the country, the people, the possibility, the opportunity and the responsibility.”
As his perspective has widened, he has caused some U.S. Catholics to adjust their sights, calling for a new energy and openness at the Vatican embassy and in the U.S. church.
Officially known as the Apostolic Nuncio, Sambi, an energetic 69-year-old Italian, is the Vatican’s top official in this country.
Recognized as the ambassador of a sovereign state, Sambi represents the interests of Pope Benedict XVI and the Holy See to the U.S. government, as well as to U.S. Catholics.
“My first duty is to be an instrument of communion between the Holy Father and the Catholic Church in the United States,” Sambi said.
“I have another aspect of my mission, which is to represent the Holy See to the political authorities, but even then not as a pure politician but always as a priest, as a bishop, in a pastoral sense.”
From his post on Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from the vice president’s residence, the gregarious archbishop has a hand in everything from helping appoint new bishops to lobbying state department officials.
He will step onto a bigger stage, perhaps, with the arrival of the pope in the U.S. next month.Papal delegates haven’t always been the most popular guys in town.
In the Middle Ages, when nuncios spread across Europe, their primary diplomatic duties were collecting taxes and checking heresy.
In the 1890s, “Americanists” rioted to protest the appointment of a Vatican delegate to the U.S., which they saw as a Roman reach to assert control, said R. Scott Appleby, a historian at the University of Notre Dame.
Sambi, a veteran diplomat who has served on five continents, is almost universally praised for his charm and openness. He serves visitors espresso, and offers personal tours of the ambassador’s mansion, including the small chapel where Benedict will celebrate Mass with 30 staffers on April 16, his 81st birthday.
Conversations with Sambi are sprinkled with references to the Gospel of Luke, Nobel Prize-winning Indian author Rabindranath Tagore, and ancient pagan axioms.
Laughter punctuates his sentences with jovial commas and exclamation points.
Since his arrival in Washington in early 2006, Sambi has thrown open the doors of the Vatican embassy with a force not seen here in some time, say Catholics and local interfaith leaders.
For the past two years, Sambi has stood outside his residence during the 9/11 Unity Walk organized by Washington’s religious leaders, greeting everyone who streamed by.
“He’s a very special person,” said the Rev. Clark Lobenstine, the longtime head of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington.
“He’s much more engaging and open and outgoing.”
“Religions are and must be, instruments of peace,” Sambi said. “Peace between the individual conscience and God, peace between individuals, and peace between peoples. If religions will not set themselves as a valid instrument of peace, they will be abandoned by the youth.”
Rocco Palmo, a correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic magazine in London, and the author of the widely read blog Whispers in the Loggia, has taken to calling Sambi “super-nuncio.”
Palmo excitedly reports Sambi’s exploits, from moving Katrina cleanup volunteers to tears to lighting candles with Deepak Chopra.“He’s been able to connect to people at an emotional level,” Palmo said.
“He’s very much an energizing force in the church at a time when we really need it.” Sambi has also shaken up the Catholic hierarchy, Palmo said, with pointed speeches to U.S. bishops that lament the “loss of credibility in the church” after the clergy sexual abuse scandal and urge a “new youthfulness, a new springtime,” in the church.
Sambi’s next assignment is introducing Benedict to the United States, and making sure that he is comfortable during his three-night stay at the embassy. Sambi’s greatest hope is that Americans get to know the “real” Benedict.
“Pope Benedict is not known enough in the United States,” Sambi said.
“What is known is not based on his personality but is based on the position that he had before as prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith.... As such, there are people who consider him a man of very solid principles, extremely rigid, inflexible, almost nonhuman.“It’s true that he’s a man of principle, but it will be enough to see him and to listen to him to discover a man of great human sensibility.”
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