Too bad. If there’s one family that’s tried hard to live the teachings of the Church, it’s the Kennedys.

Vatican sources told Il Giornale that their support for abortion disqualified Ms Kennedy and other Roman Catholics President Barack Obama had been seeking to appoint…

The Italian paper said that the Vatican strongly disapproved of Mr Obama’s support for abortion and stem cell research. The impasse over the ambassadorial appointment threatens to cloud his meeting with the Pope during a G8 summit in Itay in July.

True or not? The rumors were credible enough to draw public reproaches this week from prominent American Catholics, but a Vatican spokesman tells Catholic News it’s much ado about nothing.

“No proposals about the new ambassador of the United States to the Holy See have reached the Vatican, and therefore it is not true that they have been rejected. The rumors circulating about this topic are not reliable,” the spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, told Catholic News Service April 9.

The spokesman’s comments echoed off-the-record remarks by informed diplomatic and Vatican sources in Rome, who said the reports appeared to be unfounded…

There have been occasions in the last two years when the Vatican has objected to ambassadorial candidates — from Argentina, in the case of a divorced Catholic with a live-in partner, and from France, where the candidate was an openly gay Catholic in a union with another man.

“For Catholic ambassadors, there is the question of their matrimonial situation. But outside of that, I don’t think there are other criteria,” said one Vatican source.

There’s a lot of wiggle room in that word “proposal.” Could be that Team Barry put out feelers informally to see how Caroline’s nomination would be received in order to avoid the embarrassment of a formal appointment and rejection. The Vatican’s been leaning more on pro-choice Catholic politicians in the last few years, so it’d be hard to look the other way at having one as their official American liaison; on the other hand, publicly humiliating the princess of Camelot would cause them headaches among Catholics who still belong to the Kennedy cult. Better just to say the subject’s never come up, no?

If it’s true, though, that they’re turning away Catholics who disagree with them on abortion, isn’t it also true that the Vatican’s standards of religious orthodoxy in this area are stricter than, er, Saudi Arabia’s? Here’s the list of U.S. ambassadors to the Kingdom; not too many Islamic names among them, which seems to suit the Wahhabis just fine even though (a) the Koran is the country’s official constitution and (b) the practice of religions other than Islam is normally prohibited. Isn’t the “insult” of having an ambassador who thinks Mohammed was a false prophet greater than the insult of having an ambassador who disagrees about the sanctity of life? Exit question: Why is Obama even bothering with Caroline here? Doug Kmiec shilled embarrassingly for him for months last year as being the logical choice for pro-life voters notwithstanding The One’s record on infanticide. How much further does he have to humiliate himself before he gets a little recognition?