Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was sworn in as Secretary of State on Wednesday, kicking off his rein with a prayer by a controversial fundamentalist.
The start of the ceremony featured an invocation by Mary Ann Glendon, a far-right anti-abortion Harvard Law scholar who once attacked investigative reporting on the Catholic Church’s protection of pedophiles.
“We ask these blessings, Lord, with thankful hearts, and with gratitude for the countless blessings you have already bestowed upon our land,” Glendon said. “And we ask for forgiveness for the times we have fallen short for the great things for which you created us.”
Glendon briefly served as Ambassador to the Vatican under President George W. Bush. Her most memorable contribution to the American body politic, however, came after journalists revealed the Church’s systematic shielding of child rapists.
“All I can say, is that if fairness and accuracy have anything to do with it, awarding the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden,” she told a Catholic conference in November 2002.
The Globe eventually did win the Pulitzer. In 2015, the film “Spotlight” won an Oscar for its dramatization of the reporting.
While the film did not include Glendon’s quip, former Globe editor Marty Baron said that it should have.
“A brief glimpse of the speech might have said volumes about the culture of denial and defiance that afflicted the Church before, and for long after, our investigation,” Baron wrote in The Washington Post.
While he served as CIA Director, Pompeo repeatedly raised concerns that he was blurring the line between church and state. As Foreign Policy reported last year, he regularly attends Bible studies on government property.
Pompeo also “referenced God and Christianity repeatedly in his first all-hands speech and in a recent trip report while traveling overseas,” the publication noted.
