The new Vatican Secretary of State, Archbishop Pietro Parolin, has officially assumed his new role, but he could not attend the hand-over ceremony because of emergency surgery.
The reason for the surgery was not made known at the time, but a Vatican source later said the 58-year-old archbishop — seen as the key person to implement the reform of the Roman Curia — had appendicitis.
Though the ceremony was supposed to be a genuine changing of the guard, the focus remained on the retiring secretary, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
The cardinal, who for seven years held the post of head of Vatican diplomacy and effectively “prime minister” of the Holy See, was blamed for many of the gaffes and problems of the papacy of Benedict XVI, including the Vatileaks scandal.
In a short address reviewing his years of service, Cardinal Bertone said he hoped Archbishop Parolin would be able “to untangle the knots that still prevent the Church from being in Christ the heart of the world, the longed-for and incessantly invoked horizon”.
He acknowledged the scandals that had beset Pope Benedict XVI, saying the now-retired Pope had “suffered greatly on account of the ills that plagued the Church and for this reason he gave her new legislation in order to strike out decisively the shameful phenomenon of paedophilia among the clergy, without forgetting the initiation of new rules in economic and administrative matters”.
Thanking the cardinal, Pope Francis praised “the courage and patience with which you have faced adversities — and there have been many”.
Unlike Cardinal Bertone, Archbishop Parolin is an experienced Vatican diplomat. Pope Francis chose him to head the Secretariat of State only days after he was elected — even though he had met the archbishop only once.
“The truth is that I haven’t spoken much with him and I think that when I have the chance, I’ll ask him why he named me,” Archbishop Parolin told Venezuela’s El Universal newspaper.
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Image: The Dialog