Q. “Why should a Catholic be placed in potential conflict with the Pope?”

A. Mr. Ledeen, the premises of your question are wrong. Caroline Kennedy, like many other cafeteria Catholics who serve the culture of death, put herself “in… conflict with the Pope” (and the Church and Christ).

Also, any country can refuse to receive someone sent to it as a potential ambassador. An ambassadorship’s function is not resume-polishing for the politically well-connected but to foster cordial relations between two states. Caroline Kennedy fails in this regard because her reputation for public disregard for a very basic teaching of the Church would create scandal for the Christian city-state of the Vatican.

I suggest that Obama grow up and stop his college-prank appointments to ambassadorships. It’s not the “smart diplomacy” Obama promised, instead it’s insulting.

Now, as for the issue of whether people who lack a deep understanding of a country’s predominant cultural or religious beliefs should be appointed to embassy leadership posts and be U.S. ambassadors, I refer you to the book The Ugly American. Although the MSM promoted the use of the phrase “Ugly American” to mock U.S. tourists abroad, in the book from which the MSM stole that appellation those who were portrayed as the (figuratively) Ugly American types were U.S. Government officials, especially State Department ambassadors.

Sure, there’s some people in America who have a deep understanding of Catholic Christian or Jewish beliefs, who don’t mock those beliefs with personal and public pro-abortion or anti-semitic policy pronouncements, and who could serve as competent ambassadors yet aren’t Catholic or Jewish themselves. So, why won’t Obama find and vet such people, eh?