Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Pope’s nuncio in the United States, will deliver a major address on the Catholic faith on September 26 at 6:30 pm in the Pryzbyla Center at The Catholic University of America, a few steps from the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
The address will serve as the keynote address for a conference entitled “The Hope of the Promise: An Exploration of God’s Promise to Israel and its Fulfillment,” which will be held on the two following days on the grounds of Catholic University (Saturday and Sunday, September 27 and 28). The conference is organized by Urbi et Orbi Communications, the publisher of Inside the Vatican magazine.
The archbishop’s remarks will serve also as the keynote address at Inside the Vatican magazine’s 15th anniversary dinner. The magazine was founded in 1993 in Rome.
(Please go to the Inside the Vatican website to obtain tickets for the anniversary dinner or to sign up for conference reservations. Click here.)
Archbishop Sambi, 70, before taking up his post in the United States, served as the Vatican’s representative to Israel and Palestine. He helped arrange Pope John Paul II’s historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2000.
Archbishop Sambi is known in Church circles as an energetic and gregarious man with an ability to bring the human touch to diplomatic challenges. He speaks Italian, English, French and Spanish.
Israeli Franciscan Father David Jaeger, a longtime participant in Vatican-Israeli talks, and a speaker at the upcoming conference, said he thought Archbishop Sambi “has a very great gift for making friends with people at every level, high and low, and for getting along and winning the confidence of everyone he meets. He has a friendly, outgoing and engaging personality.”
Among Archbishop Sambi’s greatest qualities, Father Jaeger said, was his “deep and abiding priestly piety.”
Archbishop Sambi was born June 27, 1938, in the northern Italian town of Sogliano sul Rubicone. He was ordained in 1964 and earned degrees in theology and canon law before entering the Vatican’s diplomatic corps in 1969.
He worked in Vatican nunciatures in Cameroon, Jerusalem, Cuba, Algeria, Nicaragua, Belgium and India, and was apostolic nuncio in Burundi and Indonesia. In 1998 he was named as nuncio to Israel, apostolic delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine, and nuncio to Cyprus.
During his years in Israel, Archbishop Sambi was involved in talks or negotiations on a wide variety of controversial issues with the government of Israel and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In preparation for Pope John Paul’s Holy Land pilgrimage, Archbishop Sambi held numerous private meetings with religious and civil officials to work out the detailed itinerary of the visit, which proved to be highly successful.
In 2001, he led a Christian peace convoy to the besieged city of Bethlehem, calling on Israel and Palestinian militants to reject violence and restart negotiations.
In 2002, the archbishop helped end a tense, 39-day standoff between Israeli troops and scores of Palestinian gunmen who had taken refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
The same year, he helped convince Israel to rescind permission for the construction of a mosque adjacent to the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth.
In more recent years, Archbishop Sambi has negotiated with Israel to reach an agreement on taxation and financial issues regarding Church institutions in the Holy Land. To date, those talks have not born fruit.
Archbishop Sambi usually sought to downplay differences with Israel, accentuating instead the generally positive direction of Vatican-Israeli relations. He once said the high points and low points of Vatican-Israeli relations were as normal as the ups and downs on a cardiogram.
“It means the heartbeat is normal,” he said.
In late 2004, Archbishop Sambi expressed disapproval of an international gay pride parade planned for Jerusalem in August 2005. The nuncio joined leaders of other faiths in saying it would offend the religious sensibilities of Christians, Muslims and Jews. The event was canceled.
But Sambi has said he feels Israel has failed to keep promises to ease travel restrictions on Catholic clerics and remove taxes on Church-owned property in the Holy Land.
“The Holy See decided to establish diplomatic relations (in 1993) with Israel as an act of faith, leaving to later the serious promises to regulate concrete aspects of the life of the Catholic community and the Church in Israel,” Sambi said in 2007.
“If I must be frank, the relations between the Catholic Church and the state of Israel were better when there were no diplomatic ties,” he continued.
The Vatican diplomat cited a current sore point — the granting of permits for Arab Christian clergy traveling to and around the West Bank, which has been rescinded because of security concerns.
Sambi complained that the Knesset has failed to give necessary approval to various accords that had been signed by both sides, and noted that an impasse over taxes has been discussed on and off for nearly 10 years without resolution.
In 2007, tensions developed between the Vatican and Israel when the Holy See’s ambassador to Israel initially decided to boycott a Holocaust memorial service because of allegations that during World War II Pope Pius XII was silent about the mass killings of Jews.
(Please go to the Inside the Vatican website to obtain tickets for the anniversary dinner or to sign up for conference reservations. Click here.)
