Presenting his credentials to
Pope Francis, Kenneth F. Hackett officially took over as U.S. ambassador
to the Holy See Oct. 21, filling a role that had been vacant for nearly
a year.
"The United States and the Holy See have converging interests that span a
broad range of issues" including "human rights and social justice,"
Hackett wrote the same day, in the first post on his official
ambassador's blog.
"We both work to make a difference on a range of important global issues
such as trafficking in persons, interreligious dialogue, conflict
resolution, food access and security, HIV/AIDS and care for the
environment," wrote Hackett, a former president of Catholic Relief
Services, the U.S. bishops' overseas relief and development agency.
The United States has not had an ambassador at the Vatican since
November 2012, when Miguel H. Diaz resigned and left Rome to become a
professor of faith and culture at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
During Diaz's tenure, relations between Washington and the Vatican were
marked by tension, particularly over the Obama administration's plan to
require that all heath insurance plans, including those offered by most
Catholic institutions, cover sterilizations and contraceptives, which
are forbidden by Catholic moral teaching. The plan prompted Pope
Benedict XVI and the papal nuncio to the U.S. to issue public warnings
of a threat to Americans' religious freedom.
"There will be times where the position of the (Obama) administration
differs, obviously, from the Holy See," Hackett told the Catholic
Review, Baltimore's archdiocesan newspaper, last August. "But I am going
to look for -- as many of my predecessors did -- those opportunities
where we can come together and find strength in collaboration,
coincidence of interests."
Hackett is a former president of CRS, the U.S. bishops' overseas relief
and development agency, which he first joined in 1972 after a
post-college stint with the Peace Corps in Ghana. He retired as
president of CRS in December 2011.
The new ambassador is also a former North American president of Caritas
Internationalis, the confederation of humanitarian agencies of the
Catholic Church, and a former member of the board of the Pontifical
Council Cor Unum.
He told the Catholic Review in August that he was looking forward to
reconnecting in Rome with the sort of people he had befriended during
his years in relief work: "holy people who are trying their best."
"I missed that in the last year I've been retired. You don't see those
kind of people anymore, that bishop from Congo who has so many stories
to tell at supper, of so much hardship," he said. "I want to
re-establish those relationships and use them to, basically, improve
U.S. policies."