As priests are abducted in Crimea, churches burn in Sudan, and American pastors waste away in North Korean prisons, how long will it take this administration to name a new ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom?

With the president visiting Saudi Arabia and the first lady visiting China earlier this month, April would have been a prime opportunity to send a message that America values religious freedom, even in the presence of necessary allies with dismal reputations in this regard. This isn't a Democratic, Republican, liberal, or conservative issue; it's a matter of common decency and of human rights.

The ambassadorship has been vacant for six months and it has been nearly two months since President Obama stated at the National Prayer Breakfast that he "looks forward to nominating our next ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom."

I have personally witnessed the shocking truth of the president's related statement that "around the world, freedom of religion is under threat."

- Recently, I was in the West Bank where earlier this year in the village of Deir Istiya, attackers set fire to the local mosque and spray painted hate messages on its walls.

- The same day I was leaving the region, radical Islamists fired at least 40 rockets into the towns of their Jewish neighbors.

- A few weeks ago, as worshippers were gathering in St. Paul's Roman Catholic Church in Nigeria, Boko Haram a militant group trying to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state, attacked the church and killed over 45 parishioners. One of the survivors lost her husband and child in the attack and when interviewed all she could say was, "we saw hell."

CHICAGO — In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers.

"He so quickly got us," said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese's Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress's plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and "Barack Obama was key in helping us do that."

By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not Catholic — was already well known in Chicago's black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president's life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation.

This Thursday, Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr. Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ, drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic politician and the president with a terrorist "kill list." The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence.

A White House accustomed to archbishop antagonists hopes the president will find a strategic ally and kindred spirit in a pope who preaches a gospel of social justice and inclusion. Mr. Obama's old friends in the priesthood pray that Francis will discover a president freed from concerns about re-election and willing to rededicate himself to the vulnerable.

In advance of his Thursday meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, the New York Times is portraying President Obama's community organizing as a kind of Catholicism in practice. In a front page, above-the-fold piece titled "The Catholic Roots of Obama's Activism," Jason Horowitz highlights the close alliance between Obama, his organizing mentors Greg Galluzzo and Gerald Kellman, and the Catholic Church. Obama's frequent invocation of Chicago's Cardinal Bernardin is referenced, along with Obama's ties to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Horowitz notes that the alliance reached the point where young Obama was effectively proselytizing for the Catholic Church. A fuller and more accurate account of Obama's organizing paints a very different picture, however.

Before we get to the reality of Obama's organizing connection with the Catholic Church, let's have a quick look back at the founder of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Obama's Chicago organizing mentors, after all, were consciously trying to replicate Alinsky's church strategy. In fact, they were working in some of the same Catholic churches originally organized by Alinsky.

As I show in Spreading the Wealth, Alinksy created his first community organization, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, in an attempt to convince local Catholic churches to support the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, a union most local priests were reluctant to endorse because it was effectively controlled by Chicago's Communist Party. Alinksy's line with these reluctant priests was that cooperating with the union would allow the church to "beat the Communists at their own game." While there was certainly a small group of young, sharply left-leaning Catholic priests working directly and knowingly with Alinsky, it's clear that he saw himself as hoodwinking the larger and more influential group of anti-Communist priests with whom he worked. In a famous interview with Playboy, Alinsky summarized his feat of conning neighborhood priests into dropping their opposition to a Communist-dominated union, "To f**k your enemies, you've first got to seduce your allies."

Obama's organizing mentor Gerald Kellman specialized in Alinsky-style church organizing, and was trained by Alinsky himself. Kellman was brought into what would soon become Obama's organizing network by Greg Galluzzo, who never met Alinsky, but considered himself Alinsky's chief follower, "as St. Paul who never met Jesus."