National Affairs: Undiplomatic Appointment

Harry Truman is famous for 1) shrewd practical politics and 2) crashing errors of judgment. Was it the shrewd Truman or the blundering Truman who last week nominated General Mark Clark as the first full-fledged U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican? Or was this the act of the third Harry Truman, the one who on rare occasions disregards petty politics and shows glimmerings of the statesmanship that his office has thrust upon him? Whichever way it was interpreted, Truman had kicked up the hot ashes of a long-smoldering controversy.

The first formal relations between the U.S. and the Vatican were established in 1848, when President James Polk sent Jacob L. Martin, a convert to Catholicism, to Rome as charge d’affaires. At that time the Papal States controlled 16,000 square miles, compared to the Vatican’s present 108.8 acres. Twenty years later, the diplomatic era which began with Jacob Martin came to an abrupt halt. Because of Protestant criticism of the mission, Congress cut off the funds, and Resident Minister Rufus King * came home from Rome in 1868.

“No Information.” Not until 1939 did the U.S. re-establish formal contact with the Papacy. Franklin Roosevelt sent Episcopalian Myron Taylor to the Vatican as his personal representative. When Taylor resigned in January 1950, the post was not filled, and Vatican officials often made it clear that they were intensely unhappy about this lapse. When asked to comment on events in the U.S., they were inclined to reply somewhat peevishly: “We have no information on anything that goes on in America.”

Last week the President’s announcement brought “utmost joy” at the Vatican. General Clark, now chief of Army Field Forces, was commander of the army that liberated Rome in 1944. An Episcopalian and a 33rd degree Mason, he became a firm friend of Pope Pius XII. Clark will not be a mere Minister, as was his predecessor, Rufus King. His title will be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,* and his appointment will probably be followed by the naming of a Papal Nuncio to the U.S.

Swell of Protest. Many Protestant leaders across the land reacted with immediate cries of protest. The sharpest words fired at Baptist Harry Truman came from Dr. J. M. Dawson, executive secretary of the Baptist Public Affairs Committee. “It is perhaps a frantic bid for holding machine-ridden big cities in the approaching hot Presidential race,” he said. “It is a deplorable resort to expediency,, which utterly disregards our historical constitutional American system of separation of church and state.” Truman’s pastor, the Rev. Edward Hughes Pruden, said in a sermon (which the President did not hear) that he had done “all that it was possible for anyone to do” to dissuade

Truman from naming an ambassador to the Vatican.

Truman’s timing of the appointment, only a few hours before Congress was due to adjourn, meant that the Senate would not be able to discuss the appointment until it reconvenes in January.*

Few U.S. Catholics share the Vatican’s intense feeling on the subject of diplomatic representation. Certainly, no appreciable number were going to vote against Truman because he had failed to name an envoy to the Vatican. But if Protestant protests warm up, many votes might be lost to Truman in the shaky South or in critical Midwest farm areas. If politics was Truman’s motive, it was hard to see how it was smart politics.

With One Voice? The official White House announcement pointed out that 37 countries maintain diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Their representatives attend Vatican ceremonies, vouch for countrymen who request papal audiences. They call frequently at the red-walled office of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Under Secretary of State for ordinary affairs, to exchange information from other lands. Under a new committee-of-cardinals secretariat soon to be established, a U.S. ambassador would deal largely with a cardinal appointed to handle North American affairs, probably an American.

The White House announcement also said: “It is well-known that the Vatican is vigorously engaged in the struggle against Communism. Direct diplomatic relations will assist in coordinating the effort to combat the Communist menace.” Privately, White House aides pointed out the connection between the Clark appointment and Truman’s speech of Sept. 28 to the Pilgrimage of American Churchmen. The President said then: “For some time I have been trying to bring a number of the great religious leaders of the world together in a common affirmation of faith and a common supplication to the one God that all profess … It has not yet been possible to bring the religious faiths together for this purpose of bearing witness that God is the way of truth and peace. Even the Christian churches have not yet found themselves able to say, with one voice, that Christ is their Master and Redeemer and the source of their strength against the hosts of irreligion and the danger of a world catastrophe. They have not been able to agree on a simple statement like that.

“I have been working on it for a year.”

If that desire to mobilize religion against Communism was Truman’s main point of reference, the Clark appointment, however controversial, had a powerful argument on its side.

The need for coordinating the world anti-Communist effort has a practical application to U.S.-Vatican relations. Osser-vafore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, on several occasions has misunderstood U.S. policies and motives. Osservatore’s comments have contributed to European “neutralism,” a movement in which a number of prominent Catholic intellectuals participate.

A U.S. ambassador might help achieve better understanding on such points as “neutralism.” But it was questionable whether that chance would be worth the division stirred up in the U.S. by Truman’s appointment.

*King served for a time as a general in the Civil War, but resigned from the Army because he was an epileptic. His most notable service as Minister to Rome was to help bring about the arrest and extradition of John H. Surratt, of Surrattsville, Md., who conspired with Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Surratt had fled to Rome and joined the Papal Zouaves. He was never convicted, but his mother, Mary E. Surratt, was hanged for aiding Booth. King, an editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette and a leader in the movement for an expanded public-school system, said that Congress ended! the U.S. mission to the Holy See on the “erroneous grounds that the Pope refuses to permit Protestant worship within the walls of Rome.”

*Ambassador Extraordinary etc. means ordinary ambassador.

*On an entirely different point, Texas’ Senator Tom Connally was ready to oppose the nomination. Clark, he said, “showed himself unfit” for any high position by the way he directed the Rapido River battle in Italy during World War II. The 36th Division (Texas National Guard) suffered heavy losses there, and Texans can’t forget it.