Within the days surrounding Pope Francis’ dying, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was in all places.
The No. 2 determine within the Vatican, he visited Francis within the hospital, after which helped seal the papal flats after the pope died. He welcomed cardinals he knew from all over the world to the pope’s funeral, speaking to former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy. And main as much as the conclave to choose the following pope, he celebrated an outside Mass for tens of hundreds of devoted on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Plainly everybody is aware of Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, who will preside over the papal election and who has emerged because the main compromise candidate earlier than a conclave through which lots of the greater than 130 cardinals have no idea each other.
“The one candidate that for now has emerged with a sure insistence is Parolin,” mentioned Andrea Riccardi, the founding father of the Sant’Egidio Group, a Catholic group near Francis. “He represents a continuity,” added Mr. Riccardi, who’s near a number of cardinals who’re thought of papal contenders. “He has mentioned, ‘Advantage stands within the center.’”
A quiet, plodding Italian with a famously inscrutable poker face, Cardinal Parolin is deeply cautious. However at a time of world upheaval, that’s not essentially a disqualifier. Even his backers grant that he lacks Francis’ charisma and world symbolism — however because the chief of the Vatican equipment for the previous decade, he enacted Francis’ imaginative and prescient.
Cardinals have talked about Cardinal Parolin as somebody who may have a gentle, bureaucratic hand on the church’s wheel. And at 70, he may enchantment to cardinals who don’t need to be caught too lengthy with the winner.
His critics on the left query his previous feedback about same-sex marriage, which he known as a “defeat for humanity,” and his lack of pastoral expertise. His critics on the suitable criticize his position within the church’s efforts to make inroads in China, which has required negotiations with Communist leaders.
However few prelates who know him have robust emotions about him both means. And after the eventful and, for some, divisive dozen years below Francis, bland however competent could also be simply what the cardinals are in search of.
On migration, for instance, whereas Francis excoriated the inhumanity of nice powers turning the Mediterranean right into a graveyard, Cardinal Parolin mentioned after a gathering with Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, that immigration was “a really, very complicated topic.”
Some have drawn parallels to the conclave of 1939. With authoritarianism rising and the world order endangered, these cardinals elected Eugenio Pacelli, a Vatican secretary of state who had served as envoy to Germany within the Nineteen Twenties throughout the Nazis’ rise. Historians are nonetheless divided over whether or not he, as Pius XII, took a very diplomatic strategy.
And throughout the church, some liberal Catholics have questioned whether or not a measured bureaucrat with out deep pastoral expertise is what the church must hold Francis’ inclusive momentum going.
Cardinal Parolin grew up in Schiavon, a small city within the northern Italian area of Veneto that is named a cradle of popes.
He was raised by his mom, an elementary college trainer, after his father, who owned a ironmongery store, died in a automotive accident when the boy was 10.
He entered the minor seminary at 14 and was ordained at 25. However Cardinal Parolin’s profession was not on the trail of being a pastor, or a diocesan priest. He entered the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in Rome, which trains clergymen to serve within the diplomatic corps.
Within the Eighties, he was stationed in Nigeria throughout army coups and a civil conflict. Later, he labored in Mexico to revive diplomatic ties. In 1992, he returned to the Vatican, the place he joined the highly effective Secretariat of State and served on the Italy desk. He later turned the director of the Villa Nazareth college for promising college students with poor backgrounds, forming connections to younger individuals who would later be part of Italy’s elite.
However he additionally acquired baggage on the best way.
In 2002, below John Paul II, Cardinal Parolin turned the Vatican’s second most necessary diplomat, specializing in Vietnam, the place he helped normalize relations, and on China, which for a lot of within the church is the nice problem of the approaching century.
In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI tried reconciliation with China, which required its bishops to be loyal to the nation’s authorities quite than to Rome. He selected Cardinal Parolin, who was then an archbishop, to guide the talks over bishops in state-sanctioned church buildings. The talks stalled.
In 2009, Benedict gave Cardinal Parolin one other troublesome task, because the Vatican’s ambassador to Venezuela, the place prelates had been in a tense standoff with Hugo Chávez’s leftist authorities.
The cardinal’s cost in Venezuela was extra political than theological, and he employed a method that he would later name “constructive neutrality” to press church pursuits with out taking sides between the federal government and the opposition.
Venezuelans credited Cardinal Parolin — who speaks English, French and near-fluent Spanish with a slight Italian lilt — with easing tensions between the federal government and the church. It helped that his strategy to diplomacy was quite deliberate and discreet, his supporters have mentioned.
His diplomatic focus below Francis prolonged to the conflict in Ukraine and relations with Russia and the USA. However China was once more a significant agenda merchandise as Francis tried anew to enhance relations.
Cardinal Parolin helped strike a groundbreaking deal in 2018 that amounted to the primary formal recognition of the pope’s authority throughout the church in China. Conservatives thought of it a betrayal for Francis to acknowledge bishops appointed by the Chinese language authorities who had been beforehand excommunicated. Sharing any church authority, conservatives argued, created harmful circumstances for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese language Catholics who worshiped in underground church buildings loyal to the pope.
However Francis, and Cardinal Parolin, mentioned it was value it.
The church had an “angle of hope, openness and dialogue that we need to proceed on either side,” Cardinal Parolin mentioned in 2023. All of the church requested from China, he mentioned, was that “Catholics will be Catholics.”
Maybe the final word signal of Cardinal Parolin’s power headed into the conclave is an obvious effort to cease him.
American right-wing Catholic publications reported within the days earlier than the papal election that he had fainted throughout one of many common congregation conferences. The incident by no means occurred, mentioned Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman.
“It’s not true,” he mentioned.
