VATICAN CITY
Washington Post
By Abby Ohlheiser and Michelle Boorstein April 10
It’s been a few months since France appointed Laurent Stéfanini, a practicing Catholic who is also openly gay, to be the country’s next ambassador to the Holy See. This week, the European press noticed that the Vatican has yet to accept the appointment, which many are interpreting as an implicit rejection of candidate.
The Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, declined via e-mail on Thursday to comment on Stéfanini’s appointment, adding that “any host government has the right to grant agrément or refuse it for their own reasons.”
An agrément is a formal diplomatic approval of another country’s choice of an ambassador. That the Vatican has reportedly thus far withheld agrément for an ambassador who has been chosen will be seen as a rejection.
Federico Lombardi, the head of the Holy See’s press office, added in a second e-mail, “The Press Office has never done comments about appointments of ambassadors to the Holy See.”
Stéfanini worked at France’s embassy to the Vatican from 2001 to 2005, Le Monde reported, before French President François Hollande decided to appoint him to the job in early January of this year. According to Le Monde, Stéfanini is unmarried and has no children.
The rumors about the meaning of the Vatican’s apparent non-response to the appointment seem to stem from a report in “Le Journal du Dimanche.” The report, citing an unnamed Vatican insider, alleges that a decision to essentially freeze the application came from the “pope himself.”
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