֎Pietro PAROLIN (elevated 2014)

The Popeular History Podcast

IMAGE DESCRIPTION AND CREDIT:
Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons - cc-by-sa-4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
LINKS

St Peter’s Colonnade Statues:
https://stpetersbasilica.info/Exterior/Colonnades/Saints-List-Colonnades.htm

Vatican bio of Cardinal Parolin:

https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/documentation/cardinali_biografie/cardinali_bio_parolin_p.html

Pietro Parolin on FIU's Cardinals Database (by Salvadore Miranda):

https://cardinals.fiu.edu/bios2014.htm#Parolin

Cardinal Parolin on Gcatholic.org:

http://www.gcatholic.org/p/666

Cardinal Parolin on Catholic-Hierarchy.org:

https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bparolin.html

Secretariat of State on Gcatholic.org:

http://www.gcatholic.org/dioceses/romancuria/d01.htm

Secretariat of State on Catholic-Hierarchy.org:

https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dxsta.html

Monsenior Parolin's Knighthood:

https://www.quirinale.it/onorificenze/insigniti/161548

Cardinal Parolin speaking on behalf of Pope Francis at COP28 (English, via Vatican News):

https://youtu.be/xF4AgpYjhws?si=NHmzgYqpdLtkaQlO

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey folks! Remember last episode when I said I reached out to the ladies from Pontifacts for comment on one of the colonnade statues that help frame Saint Peter’s square? Well they got back to me on *several* of them, and it looks like we’re going to have an ongoing segment for them we can refer back to whenever we have a Rome-born Cardinal, because I’m absolutely not going to miss the opportunity to have Bry and Fry judge some statues! So, welcome to Faciam Saintues, starting with the statue I’m retroactively associating with Cardinal Lojudice, that of St Gallicanus:
FACIAM SAINTUE W/BRY AND FRY 1

This week of course we’ve got a double header, because they also covered our patron statue for Cardinal Zuppi, that of Saint Leonard of Noblac:
FACIAM SAINTUE W/BRY AND FRY 2

All right, with that out of the way, let’s get on with the show!

Welcome to Cardinal Numbers, a rexypod ranking all the Cardinals of the Catholic Church we can get our hands on, from the Catacombs to Kingdom Come.

Check out the show notes for sources, further reading, and a transcript.

Today we're discussing another current Cardinal of the Catholic Church, one of the 120 or so people who will choose the next Pope when the time comes.

Pietro Parolin was born on January 17, 1955, in Schiavon, a community in the diocese of Vicenza, part of Italy's Veneto region. This is actually our third Cardinal from the Veneto region, if you remember Cardinals Marchetto and Gugerotti we laid Gugerotti's scene in fair Verona and Cardinal Marchetto was from Vicenza, the city that gives Pietro's home diocese its name. It's worth noting that Cardinal Marchetto was one of our three cardinals elevated this past year who were already over the age of 80, meaning Pietro will be our first actual Papal elector born in the diocese, which is fair enough because there's a lot more dioceses in the world than there are Papal Electors.

Anyways, Pietro was the son of Luigi Parolin, a hardware store manager, and his wife, and an elementary school teacher named Ada Miotti. Pietro was one of three children, having a sister, Maria Rosa, and a brother, Giovanni. At the age of 10 father Luigi died in a car accident, and young Pietro found a different kind of father in his pastor, who guided Pietro from altar serving to Vicenza seminary, which he entered in 1969 around the age of 14. Eleven years later, he was ordained as priest for the Diocese of Vicenza at the age of 25.

Father Parolin got a couple years of pastoral work in before the Bishop decided to send him to Rome for additional studies in Canon law, presumably to put him to work for the Diocese but the trouble with sending promising young priests to Rome is sometimes Rome doesn't send them back. In 1986 he received his doctorate in Canon Law with a thesis on the Synod of Bishops, and that same year Fr Parolin entered the Diplomatic Corps for the Holy See–something I have to think wasn't *entirely* out of the blue, considering he had studied diplomacy at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy while working on his doctorate. Either way, he was on board, his bishop was on board, and the Vatican was most certainly on board. He was off to sunny Nigeria to serve as an adetto, which is apparently Vatican-speak for an attaché, which is in turn diplomacy speak for a generic staff member for the main diplomat, in this case, presumably, the nuncio. He was soon promoted to secretary, and then, following the normal custom of the Holy See's Diplomatic Corps, promptly switched gears to three years of diplomatic service in Mexico. He kept rising through the ranks, becoming a Monsignor, and eventually undersecretary of the section for the Relations with the States within the Secretariat of State, which is a mouthful. This section of Monsignor Parolin's bio is the first time in all these bios I saw an Interdicasterial Commission mentioned, the multidepartmental role he served there seems to have served him well given his future posts.

Like several of our Cardinals, Parolin is knighted, which is interesting because Italy doesn't even have a monarchy but yup, on June 24th 2005 he was named knight grand cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

On August 17, 2009, Pietro Parolin joined the upper crust of the Holy See's diplomatic corps, being named as the full on Nuncio to Venezuela. I'm sure there are exceptions, but generally you don't get to be nuncio without being a bishop, and in this case Monsignor Parolin was no exception– he was announced as Titular Archbishop of Acquapendente that same day.

A few years later, in 2013, Pope Benedict resigned the Papacy and Pope Francis was elected to replace him. By August of that year Archbishop Parolin was named as Pope Francis’ Secretary of State. At 58, he was certainly on the younger end for a person holding such a high office, the last person to be Secretary of State before their 60th birthday was Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. Dun dun dunnn… also, though it wouldn't be out of character for Pope Francis to ignore this rule, as Secretary of State Archbishop Parolin was canonically required to be made a cardinal whenever Pope Francis got around to nominating a fresh batch, which he did in February 2014. Parolin's name was at the top of the list, and I mean that literally, as we saw when we went through the 2023 consistory the new Cardinals are pretty much always listed by diplomatic precedence, or, you know, something along those lines.

Before he even took possession of his titular church, Pope Francis had nominated him to four dicasteries and the super-selective Council of Cardinals, where he's still a member- and his name is at the top of that list as well.

As Pope Francis’ Secretary of State, part of Cardinal Parolin's job to run around with the giant scissors doing any ribbon cuttings and celebrations that might need done, for example in January 2017 he was named pontifical legate to the celebration of the 25th World Day of the Sick, and later that year he was named pontifical legate to the celebration of the eighth centenary of the consecration of the Basilica of the Cistertian Abbey of Casamari, Italy. The sheer quantity of such special missions nearly made me miss the fact that Pope Francis promoted him to the higher rank of Cardinal-Bishop in 2018. Most of the Cardinal-Bishops reach that venerable position at a late stage in their career indeed, with the only other Cardinal-Bishops who are still under 80 and thus eligible to serve as Papal Electors being Cardinal Tagle, who we discussed previously, and Cardinal Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Baghdad, who ranks as a Cardinal-Bishop automatically by virtue of being both a Cardinal and a Patriarch of a Sui Iuris–that is, self-governing–Catholic Church.

If I were picking the Italian I'd consider most likely to be the next Pope today, I'd pick Cardinal Parolin with little hesitation.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin is eligible to participate in future conclaves until he turns 80 in 2035.

Today's episode is part of Cardinal Numbers, and there will be more Cardinal Numbers next week. Thank you for listening; God bless you all! Thanks, Joe!