The precarious health of Pope Francis is fueling speculation about a conclave not far off. And the role of vicar taken on at this juncture by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, 70, secretary of state, seems to make him the right man for the transition and succession, with the prudent balance he is demonstrating at this difficult time.
Nothing could be more illusory. Francis has never fully set his reliance on Parolin, who also does not seem capable of gathering among the cardinals the widespread trust that is necessary for election.
Interactions between Parolin and Francis are much rarer and colder than one might think, even now that their collaboration would be more useful than before. Questioned by journalists a few days after the pope’s return from the hospital, the cardinal replied that he knew little or nothing: “To my knowledge, the pope is not seeing anyone at the moment, he is not receiving visitors, and I have no other news.”
But in the days when the pope was hospitalized at Gemelli General, Parolin had gone through worse.
The secretary of state’s first visit with Francis was scheduled for February 19. But instead of him, the pope preferred to receive Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, to whom he said he knew “that there are those who pray for my death,” but in the meantime “the Lord of the harvest has thought to leave me here.”
The pope granted Parolin his first visit on February 24, provided that he was accompanied by his “substitute,” Edgar Peña Parra, much more in Francis’s confidence.
And the same happened on March 2, two days after the worst respiratory crisis for the pope. Who, however, left Parolin outside the door, allowing only Peña Parra to enter.
On March 9 both were admitted to his presence. And then not another meeting with Parolin until April 7, fifteen days after Francis’s return to the Vatican on March 23.
Shortly before the month spent in the hospital, another of the pope’s slights of Parolin was, on February 6, the indefinite extension, as dean of the college of cardinals, of the ninety-one-year-old Giovanni Battista Re, who had reached the expiration of his mandate. The holder of this role is responsible for overseeing the pre-conclave and conclave, and Parolin had all the credentials to be elected as the new dean, by the select circle of “cardinal bishops” that has the faculty of making this determination and of which he too is part. But evidently Francis is not pleased that it should be up to Parolin to govern his succession.
Parolin, in fact, has always had to endure rather than assist with Francis’s pontificate. Excluded at first from the select group, referred to as the C9, of cardinals called by the pope to advise him in the government of the universal Church, he has seen the powers of the secretariat of state eroded year after year, to the point of the complete removal of the funds at his disposal. Not to mention the terrible blot on his reputation inflicted by the Vatican trial arranged over the ill-advised purchase of a building in London on Sloane Avenue: a trial in which Parolin does not figure among the defendants, but which has shown him incapable of running the machinery of the secretariat of state entrusted to his leadership.
As for international politics, which is the primary field of action of the secretariat of state, here too Francis has always preferred to do and undo as he sees fit, if anything with the help of the Community of Sant’Egidio, without either Parolin or his foreign minister Paul R. Gallagher being able to act as gatekeeper – if they had wanted to do so – for papal decisions of which they were often not even forewarned.
The only success that Vatican diplomacy can boast of in the last twelve years is the agreement between the United States and Cuba, concluded in 2014 but negotiated with the mediation of the Holy See since before Parolin became secretary of state. A success moreover contradicted by the pope’s subsequent trip to Cuba, ostentatiously devoid of any act or word of support on behalf of the martyrdom of the Castro regime’s opponents.
China is the biggest sore spot. On the key matter of the appointment of bishops, Parolin had worked since 1996 to reach an agreement with Vietnam, where now the selection of each new bishop falls to the pope, with the Vietnamese authorities having the right to accept his appointment or not. But with China, the agreement signed in 2018 reversed the priority, granting Beijing the selection of each new bishop, with the pope called on to endorse it or not only as a followup; what is more, forced in fact to swallow it even when it is imposed with highhandedness and without advance notice, as happened with the 2023 installation of a man of the regime as bishop of Shanghai.
Parolin acknowledged last January that “sometimes there are also slight setbacks” in the implementation of the agreement. But it is no wonder that the most authoritative and indomitable critic of the persecutory Chinese regime, Hong Kong cardinal Joseph Zen Zekiun, 93, arrested on May 11, 2022, then released on bail and sentenced to a fine, and still under investigation for the violation of national security, should identify none other than the secretary of state as the one responsible for the rollout of that stranglehold agreement, in obedience to the pope, who in September 2020 even refused to meet with Zen, who in vain had hastened to Rome to tell him of his affliction and that of many Chinese Catholics.
In Latin America, Nicaragua is another resounding theater of failure for Vatican diplomacy. Starting from the expulsion of the nuncio ordered in 2022 by the tyrannical president Daniel Ortega, there it is a whole crescendo of abuses, expulsions, kidnappings, incarcerations, culminating in the sentencing to 26 years in prison of the heroic bishop of Matagalpa, later commuted to exile, endured in silence by Rome.
Not to mention Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, on which Pope Francis, the secretariat of state, and the ever-present Community of Sant’Egidio have long been taking different and often contrasting lines, with the result of making the Church’s action confused and ineffective. On a par with the marginality of the Holy See with respect to the conflicts in the Middle East of yesterday and today: a marginality aggravated by its reckless proximity to untrustworthy roadmates like Putin’s Russia and Iran.
In short, Cardinal Parolin will not go down in history as the weaver of a great geopolitics of the Church. He will be remembered, if anything, as the last faded emulator of that “Ostpolitik” which had its master, in the sixties and seventies of the last century, in Cardinal Agostino Casaroli.
Casaroli and his policy of “appeasement” with the Soviet empire receive homage for “the martyrdom of patience.” But the true hero of the collapse of that empire, with a completely different political vision, was not he but John Paul II, in whose memory it paradoxically fell to Parolin to celebrate the Mass at St. Peter’s last April 2, on the twentieth anniversary of his death.
Benedict XVI too was not gentle in his judgment of “Ostpolitik.” In his last book-length interview, after his resignation, he said that “Casaroli’s policy, although well-intentioned, had substantially failed.”
In the college of cardinals, one strong and explicit critique of this diplomatic method to which Parolin holds was recently expressed by Dominik Duka, 81, a Dominican, an accomplished theologian and archbishop of Prague from 2010 to 2022, who paid even with imprisonment the costs of the communist oppression.
But then, the briefcase of a candidate for bishop of Rome cannot fail to include the quality of being a pastor of souls, a field in which Parolin has never proven himself, devoid as he is of any experience at the head of a diocese, in a lifetime spent solely in the service of Vatican diplomacy.
In the double synod on the family of 2014 and 2015, the most embattled of all those convened by Francis, Parolin sided with the innovators and then worked to give a more canonically solid presentation to communion for the divorced and remarried, initially permitted by the pope – in the post-synodal exhortation – only in an ambiguous footnote that he later said he didn’t even remember, during one of his in-flight press conferences.
Nor, on other occasions, has Parolin ruled out the possibility of having a married clergy also in the Latin Church. With the effect of being looked upon with a certain affinity by the progressive wing of the college of cardinals.
But to the cardinals who, approaching him, show interest in including him among the “papabili,” he always replies that no, he doesn’t even think about it; indeed, he really doesn’t want to accept such a role, because his only dream is to retire to the life of a simple priest in the countryside of his Veneto.
And there’s no reason to think he isn’t sincere.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
