In the days around the death of Pope Franciscus, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was everywhere.
The no. 2 Figure in the Vatican, he visited Francis in the hospital and then helped to seal the papal apartments after the pope died. He welcomed cardinals he knew from all over the world in the Pope’s funeral and spoke with former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Volodymyr Zensky van Ukraine and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy. And in the run -up to the conclave to choose the next pope, he celebrated an outdoor mass for tens of thousands of believers on the stairs of St. Peter’s Basilica.
It seems that everyone Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican State Secretary of the State who will chair the papal elections and who has emerged as the leading compromise candidate before a conclave in which many of the more than 130 cardinals do not know each other.
“The only candidate who has arisen for the time being with a certain insistence is Parolin,” said Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Sant’egidio community, a Catholic group close to Francis. “He represents continuity,” added Mr. Riccardi, which is close to various cardinals that are considered papal contenders. “He said,” Virtue is in the middle. “
A quiet, struggle Italian with a famous inscrutable poker surface, cardinal parolin is deep careful. But in a time of global revolution that is not necessarily a disqualifier. Even his backers admit that he is missing the charisma and the worldwide symbolism of Francis – but as a leader of the Vatican machines for the past decade, he introduced Francis’s vision.
Cardinals have talked about cardinal parolin as someone who could have a stable, bureaucratic hand on the wheel of the church. And at the age of 70 he was able to rely on cardinals who do not want to hold with the winner for too long.
His critics on the left questions are earlier comments about same -sex marriage, which he called a “defeat for humanity” and his lack of pastoral experience. His critics on the right criticize his role in the efforts of the church to get to China, which requires negotiations with communist leaders.
But few prelates who know him have strong feelings about him anyway. And after the eventful and, for some, division for decades under Francis, can be bland but competent exactly what the cardinals are looking for.
For example, in migration, while Francis indignant the inhumanity of great powers that the Mediterranean Sea turned into a graveyard, Cardinal Parolin said after a meeting with the right -wing Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, that immigration was “a very, very complex subject”.
Some have drawn parallels with the conclave of 1939. With authoritarianism that rises and threatened the world order, those Cardinals Eugenio Pacelli, a State Secretary of Vatican who had served as envoys in the 1920s in the 1920s during the emergence of the Nazis. Historians are still divided on whether he, as Pius XII, received an exaggerated diplomatic approach.
And within the church, some liberal Catholics have wondered if a measured bureaucrat without deep pastoral experience is what the church needs to keep the inclusive momentum of Francis.
Cardinal Parolin grew up in Schiavon, a small town in the North -Italian region of Veneto that is known as a cradle of popes.
He was raised by his mother, a primary school teacher, after his father, who owned a hardware store, died in a car accident when the boy was 10.
He entered the Minor Seminarie at the age of 14 and was ordered at the age of 25. But the career of Cardinal Parolin was not on the way to be a pastor, or a diocesan priest. He entered the Pontifical Precclesiastical Academy in Rome, which trains priests to serve in the diplomatic corps.
In the 1980s he was stationed in Nigeria during military coups and a civil war. He later worked in Mexico to restore diplomatic ties. In 1992 he returned to the Vatican, where he became a member of the powerful State Secretariat and served on the Italy office. He later became the director of the Villa Nazareth School for promising students with a bad background and formed connections with young people who would later come to the Italian elite.
But he also acquired luggage on the way.
In 2002, under John Paul II, Cardinal Parolin became the second most important diplomat of the Vatican, aimed at Vietnam, where he helped to normalize relationships, and on China, who is the great challenge of the coming century for many in the church.
In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI tried reconciliation with China, where his bishops were loyal to the government of the country instead of Rome. He chose Cardinal Parolin, who was then an archbishop, to lead the conversations about bishops in churches sanctioned by the state. The conversations got stuck.
In 2009 Benedict Cardinal Parolin gave a difficult assignment, as ambassador to the Vatican in Venezuela, where prelates were in a tense distance with the left -wing government of Hugo Chávez.
The indictment of the Cardinal in Venezuela was more political than theological, and he used a style that he would later call “positive neutrality” to press church interests without taking a party between the government and the opposition.
Venezuelans have credited Cardinal Parolin-this English, French and near-flowing Spanish speaks with a light Italian lilt with relaxation of tensions between the government and the church. It helped that his approach to diplomacy was rather intentional and discreet, his supporters said.
His diplomatic focus under Francis expanded to the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia and the United States. But China was again an important agenda item, because Francis again tried to improve relationships.
Cardinal Parolin helped to close a groundbreaking deal in 2018 that amounted to the first formal recognition of the Pope’s authority in the church in China. Conservatives considered it a betrayal for Francis to acknowledge bishops appointed by the Chinese government that had previously been excommunicated. Sharing a ecclesiastical authority, argued conservatives, created dangerous circumstances for the millions of Chinese Catholics who worshiped in underground churches that were loyal to the Pope.
But Francis and Cardinal Parolin said it was worth it.
The church had a “attitude of hope, openness and dialogue that we want to continue on both sides,” said Cardinal Parolin in 2023. The entire church early from China, he said, was that “Catholics could be Catholics.”
Perhaps the ultimate sign of the power of Cardinal Parolin that goes into the conclave is a clear effort to stop him.
American right -wing Catholic publications reported in the days before the papal elections that he fainted during one of the general congregation meetings. The incident never took place, said Matteo Bruni, the spokesperson for Vatican.
“It’s not true,” he said.
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