The emerging stature of Parolin

Today, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, departs for a four-day trip to Moscow during which he’ll meet both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, thereby turning a neat double-play — advancing both the Vatican’s geopolitical agenda, as well as its desire for closer relations with the world’s 225-300 million Orthodox Christians.

Aug 18, 2017

John L Allen Jr
Today, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, departs for a four-day trip to Moscow during which he’ll meet both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, thereby turning a neat double-play — advancing both the Vatican’s geopolitical agenda, as well as its desire for closer relations with the world’s 225-300 million Orthodox Christians.

For those with eyes to see, the trip is additional confirmation that there’s no single figure in Pope Francis’ Vatican today more trusted, or more powerful, than the 62-year-old Parolin.

Let us untie the knots! Just one month after Pope Francis’ election in 2013, he announced the formation of a Council of Cardinal Advisers who, to a large extent, are representatives hailing from different continents. Their appointments were meant to signal a change — that the people of the peripheries have a significant role to play in the life of the Church.

Thus, the process of de-centralisation at the Vatican began. This meant that the important decisions were to be made by representatives of the local churches around the world rather than Roman bureaucrats. These cardinals came to be known as “C8”.

Then, in April 2014, Francis named Parolin an additional member of this Council of Cardinal Advisers, forcing a name change in the popular argot from the “C8” to the “C9.” Later that year, Pope Francis also named Parolin to the Congregation for Bishops, giving him a key role in shaping the next generation of prelates around the world.

To begin, there’s the root fact that Parolin has Francis’ trust. Parolin was widely seen as the best and brightest Vatican diplomat of his generation, he’s a man of personal integrity and, plus, he’s simply a really nice guy who’s hard not to like.

Beyond that, there are likely three other factors that have assisted Parolin’s rise.

First, Francis is a politically and diplomatically activist Pope, who cares deeply about matters such as the Colombia peace process, ending Cold War tensions between the United States and Cuba and the unravelling situation in Venezuela.

That’s Parolin’s wheelhouse, and it’s logical that, in a time of dynamic papal diplomacy, the profile of his top diplomat would also grow.

Second, Parolin’s erstwhile former rival, Pell, has been distracted by legal challenges in his native Australia, and is now home for an indefinite period fighting allegations of “historical sexual offences.” Pell’s star had already dimmed inside the Vatican before those charges were announced but, clearly, this hasn’t helped.

Third, the traditional counter-weight to the Secretariat of State has long been the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog agency once known as La Suprema, or the “supreme” department, for its critical role in bestowing (or withholding) theological approval for almost everything the place does.

In the John Paul years, Cardinal Angelo Sodano was seen as a powerful Secretary of State too, but his authority was always balanced by the huge influence of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would go on to become Benedict XVI.
Today, however, the CDF does not play the same role under Pope Francis, meaning that it no longer poses a serious challenge to the preeminence of the Secretariat of State.

Given the intersection of those realities, today a common take in Rome is that Parolin may actually be the most powerful Secretary of State the Vatican has seen since Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who served under Pope Pius XI in the 1930s, before being elected as Pope Pius XII.

That history might suggest Parolin would have a future himself as a papal candidate and, at just 62, there could be a fairly long shelf-life for that undercurrent of speculation. What’s not speculative, however, is that in the here-and-now, when you look at Parolin, you’re basically looking at the face of authority in the Pope Francis era. --Crux (Edited)

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