“Congress will probably never send a Minister to his Holiness,” John Adams once wrote. 205 years later, Ronald Reagan proved him wrong. Today marks thirty years since the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See, a feat that did not come easy.
Ronald Reagan appointed his longtime friend and ranchero William A. Wilson to be his personal envoy to the Holy See in 1981, but a birthday entry in the president’s diary indicates Reagan wanted more for Wilson. The Gipper griped that the State Department was taking “forever” to clear his appointments and that somebody ought to “get off his ass and do it.” Reagan wanted Wilson approved soon “so he can meet Pope (he’s to be Ambas. to Vatican) in Alaska.” Standing in Reagan’s way was an 1867 law, passed amid open anti-Catholicism, that banned funds “for the support of an American legation at Rome.”
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