May I introduce myself? I am Sally Axworthy, the new British Ambassador to the Holy See. I presented my credentials to Pope Francis on 19 September. Over the coming four years, I hope to blog regularly to give an insight into the work of this Embassy
I come to Rome having just spent six months learning Italian (one of the working languages of the Vatican), including in the beautiful city of Siena. From Siena I was able to walk parts of the Via Francigena, the pilgrim route linking Canterbury and Rome, whose stages are those noted down at the end of the tenth century by Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury. The route is a symbol of the ancient ties between the UK and the Holy See.
This Embassy is an unusual one. I am accredited not to a state, but to a non-territorial institution which represents the authority of the papacy over the Catholic Church. The central institutions of the Holy See are tiny. Its territory, the Vatican City State, covers an area about one third that of Hyde Park. But the Holy See’s reach is vast, with 1.28 billion Catholics worldwide. Pope Francis’s message, as I found out as I prepared for this job, has struck chords with people, believers and non-believers, from deepest Cornwall (where I live when in the UK) to historic Siena.
My career so far has been spent in more traditional embassies: in Russia as the Soviet Union collapsed; in Ukraine when the UK established a new embassy to the newly-independent state; in Germany at a time of intense debate about our role in the EU (sound familiar?); and most recently in India. I spent some years working on services for vulnerable adults in the south west of England. And recently I have contributed to international efforts to end the conflicts in Somalia and Libya. The nice thing about this job is that I suspect I will use the whole range of that experience.
So what will my job involve? I see my role as working in the space where the Pope’s objectives overlap with the UK’s. There are many such areas. We have well-established cooperation on combating modern slavery through the Santa Marta Group. Baroness Anelay made a successful visit to Rome in May to talk to religious communities about working together to prevent sexual violence in conflict. We have shared objectives on climate change, and on ending conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. I will say more about these themes in future blogs.
Some things will need getting used to. Coming from a Foreign Office that is now 43% women, with 28% female ambassadors, I am immediately struck that I am operating in a world that is largely male. I do however have several female ambassadorial colleagues, and I look forward to meeting the lay and religious women working at the Vatican. I am one of only three British ambassadors in the world who still wear a diplomatic uniform, which includes a bicorne hat and a sword. I still need to improve my Italian. It has been serviceable so far, although I did get rather lost when an archbishop was explaining Thomas Aquinas’s views on sin to me.
Perhaps the biggest challenge will be working out how to work with an organisation that represents the Catholic Church, not an international organisation, not an NGO and not a state. The Pope puts moral matters first and aims to speak to the hearts of men and women. Traditional foreign policy concerns tend to be more temporal. But as someone who was gently reprimanded at university for seeing history through a moral prism, I suspect I might enjoy that particular challenge…