Trying to put daylight between Obama and the pope

Pope Francis is everyone’s man of the year, so if you’re a critic of President Obama you might want to try to portray the president as anti-pope. It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what two former U.S. ambassadors to the Vatican try to do in a bizarre op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

In a piece titled “A Mystifying U.S. Diplomatic Pullback From the Vatican,” former ambassadors Jim Nicholson and Ray Flynn criticize the Obama administration for planning to move the headquarters of the U.S. Embassy at the Vatican from a standalone office to surplus space in the U.S. Embassy to Italy.

Nicholson, a former Republican national chairman, and Flynn, a maverick Democrat who supported Mitt Romney for president, say that this move amounts to “downgrading the Embassy to the Holy See,” though they don’t explain how. Presumably the pope’s minions will return phone calls and emails from U.S. diplomats regardless of the address of the embassy.

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But the article isn’t just unconvincing; it’s offensive. The authors float, without actually endorsing, the idea that the move is a “deliberate slap at the Catholic Church” or maybe a reflection of “veiled anti-Catholicism.” That sleazy insinuation is what you’d expect from two politicians who played diplomat for a while.

Everybody in American politics wants a piece of this pope. The Times recently reported that Obama had his speechwriters revise a speech to add this quotation from the pontiff: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2 points?” But at least the papal quote accorded with Obama’s own views. It’s hard to imagine those words being cut and pasted into a Mitt Romney speech.

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Follow Michael McGough on Twitter @MichaelMcGough3