It is a mystery tale involving the Vatican, the White House and Camelot, with the principal characters starring Pope Benedict, US President Barack Obama and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late JFK. But none of the central characters is enlightening us on the plot.The shadowy story began a week ago when an American blog revealed that the Vatican had rejected three candidates presented by the Obama administration for the prestigious post of US ambassador to the Holy See. This list included Caroline Kennedy and Douglas Kmiec, a former legal counsel for presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush who came to public prominence during the presidential campaign as a pro-life Republican making a Catholic case for Mr Obama.
The story was lapped up by the Italian media. Il Giornale, the Milan daily newspaper owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's family, reported that the appointment to succeed the ambassador appointed by George W Bush -- Mary Ann Glendon -- had run into difficulties because of the "strained" relations between the White House and the Holy See over the president's public support for abortion and stem cell research.
During last year's campaign between Mr Obama and Republican John McCain, a Vatican official branded the Democratic Party as "the party of death" because of its pro-choice stand on abortion. But millions of Catholics cast their vote for Mr Obama.
When he was elected as the country's first black president, the Vatican appeared to be reconciled to dealing with the first pro-choice US administration since Bill Clinton. Pope Benedict sent a private message to Mr Obama, a member of a black Christian church, hoping God would "enlighten him and help him in his great responsibility" and conferring "God's blessings on the American people so that together with all people of good will, a world of peace and justice can be built".
However, the season of goodwill has not lasted long, as indicated by the undue delay in Mr Obama's appointment of his envoy to the Holy See. One of Mr Obama's first acts was to end a ban on federal funding to international groups that perform or promote abortions -- the Vatican was not happy at all.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the American media has avidly picked up the Italian reports suggesting that Caroline Kennedy had been proposed to Mr Obama for the job by Democratic Senator John Kerry, a Catholic who lost the race for the presidency to Bush in 2004, as a reward for her support -- and that of her uncle, the ailing Ted Kennedy -- of Mr Obama for the presidency.
Vatican spokesman and Jesuit priest, Fr Federico Lombardi, said that he checked the reports in the American and Italian media and there was no truth to them. He told the US Catholic News Service that no proposals for the job had yet been made to the Vatican.
However, this denial did not 'kill' the story for veteran Vatican watchers who accepted that no formal presentation of a candidate had been made by Washington to the Vatican, but were convinced that tensions had emerged in informal contacts among officials of the world's top two temporal and spiritual powers.
In fact, the story took on an added dimension when it was linked to a controversy that was raging over the invitation by America's premier Catholic university Notre Dame for Mr Obama to deliver the commencement address next month and receive an honorary degree.
Conservative and noisy Catholic right-to-life groups and some bishops took up the cudgels, damning the president of Notre Dame, Fr John Jenkins, for endorsing Mr Obama's pro-choice views on abortion and his support of stem cell research. The ugly tone of their protests was embodied in a poison pen e-mail carrying a picture of a prisoner behind bars under the fake headline of 'Jenkins arrested for impersonating a Catholic'.
Although Fr Jenkins pleaded that the invitation did not imply approval of Mr Obama's positions on abortion and stem cell research, the controversy became more heated when a leading critic among the bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, condemned Notre Dame in no uncertain terms.
"It is clear that Notre Dame didn't understand what it means to be Catholic when they issued this invitation and didn't anticipate the kind of uproar that would be consequent to the decision, at least not to the extent that it has happened", the cardinal thundered. Pointing out that the bishops did not control Notre Dame, he urged conservative Catholics to send their angry e-mails to the university rather than clog up episcopal administration.
Writing in the liberal National Catholic Reporter, John L Allen Jr, America's most respected Vatican reporter, appealed for charity and perspective in the increasingly acrimonious Notre Dame debate. "In a nutshell, my hope is that American Catholics will manage their disagreements over the Obama appearance without turning this into yet another nasty front in our version of the culture wars," he wrote.
"Inviting a pro-choice president of the United States to speak at the country's premier Catholic university may be highly charged at the level of symbolism and political fallout, but that does not make its advisability a matter of dogma. There's no heresy implied in either supporting or opposing the move, so Catholics ought to be able to disagree without casting one another as enemies of the faith."
However, this cultural civil war within the Catholic Church runs deep on account of the emphasis placed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the defence of human life from conception to natural death as core Catholic values.
The papal view is zealously championed as a badge of authentic Catholic identity by conservative American Catholics, even though recent Gallup poll data showed that American Catholics are more liberal than their non-Catholic compatriots on issues like sex (non-marital and gay) and gambling, but are split over abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Not surprisingly, Gallup also found that "committed Catholics", those who go to church regularly, are more in line with church teachings on these issues.
This debate, therefore, is more than a storm in an ecclesiastical chalice. It relates to the wider question of how Catholics engage public figures who hold pro-choice views without seeming to approve those views, rather than denouncing and boycotting them. It is essentially a struggle between intellectual freedom versus doctrinal certitude.
Nor is the controversy likely to go away quickly. Mr Obama is due to appear at Notre Dame's commencement ceremony on May 17 -- only two days after Pope Benedict will have completed his visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. On that trip, the German pontiff will engage on critical issues relating to Catholic-Muslim and Catholic-Jewish relations, and will call for peace in the Middle East.
However, it is the US, not the Vatican, which holds the key to unlocking the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This reality poses the acute problem for Pope Benedict to temper his hawkish stand on moral issues by returning to the traditional realpolitik policy of a worldly minded Holy See by accepting the American ambassadorial nomination regardless of the personal beliefs of its candidate.
To insist that an American ambassador should be in line with official Catholic belief amounts to confessional blackmail against a nation which prides itself on the separation of church and state. Benedict's stance is a remanifestation of Vatican doctrinal imperialism that is contrary to the more open approach of goodwill to all nations and creeds taught by Pope John XXIII.
Pope Benedict may have acted as infallible when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was the Church's doctrinal rottweiler. As Pope and as head of the Holy See, he needs to be more diplomatic and accept a modus vivendi between moral authoritarianism and respect for the secular world. As the Notre Dame row shows, he is a loser too on the intellectual freedom front.
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