The State Department has declassified a report by IWP Professor Thomas Melady, former US Ambassador to the Vatican, about religious freedom and reciprocity.
Writing in The Ambassador’s Review journal in an article cleared for publication today, Ambassador Melady reveals that the late Pope John Paul II in 1991 asked then-President George H. W. Bush to use his “good offices” with Riyadh to allow Christians in the kingdom to practice their own religion.
Despite the presence at the time of more than a half-million predominantly Catholic Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi monarchy banned them from practicing their religion. Fifteen years later, not a single Christian church exists in Saudi Arabia.