Trump picks CatholicVote president Brian Burch as ambassador to Vatican

[Michie]

President-elect Donald Trump selected CatholicVote president and co-founder Brian Burch to serve as the United States ambassador to the Holy See, he announced on Truth Social Friday afternoon.

“Brian is a devout Catholic, a father of nine, and president of CatholicVote,” Trump wrote in the Dec. 20 post. “He has received numerous awards and demonstrated exceptional leadership, helping build one of the largest Catholic advocacy groups in the country.”

CatholicVote is a political advocacy group that endorsed Trump in January and ran advertisements in support the president-elect during his campaign. According to CatholicVote, the organization spent over $10 million on the 2024 elections.

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Trump picks CatholicVote president Brian Burch as Vatican ambassador

CatholicVote is a political advocacy group that endorsed Trump in January and ran advertisements in support of the president-elect during his campaign.

www.catholicnewsagency.com

 

[RileyG]

That’s pretty awesome!

 

[Michie]

A good change of presidential administrations typically leads to changes in U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad, especially at the ambassadorial level. This, in turn, leads to speculations, some of them zany, about the post of U.S. ambassador to the Holy See (typically mislabeled as “U.S. ambassador to the Vatican”). Herewith, then, some clarifications and demystifications about this position.

The entity that sends and receives ambassadors is not “the Vatican,” but the Holy See. “The Vatican” means several things. “The Vatican” can be a stand-in for the independent micro-state known as “Vatican City State” (Stato della Città del Vaticano), created by the 1929 Lateran Pacts. It can refer to the complex of buildings adjacent to the Papal Basilica of St. Peter’s. But the entity that sends and receives ambassadors – the entity with which the United States has full diplomatic exchange at the ambassadorial level – is the Holy See.

And what is the “Holy See”? It is the embodiment, for purposes of international law and diplomacy, of the ministry of the Bishop of Rome as universal pastor of the Catholic Church. The Holy See has had what is known technically as international legal personality since at least 1500, meaning that the Holy See was exchanging diplomatic representation with other sovereign actors (kings, princes, etc.) long before the modern nation-state existed. The Holy See continued to be recognized as an international diplomatic actor even when the Bishop of Rome controlled no sovereign territory of his own between 1870 and 1929.

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Embassy Vatican: Some Demystifications | Denver Catholic

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