Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State for the last 12 years and its top diplomat, has emerged on nearly every shortlist as an obvious papal contender.
Parolin – a 70-year-old from a small town in Italy’s deeply Catholic northern Veneto region – is said to be a steady administrator who could bring some calm after three consecutive papacies that were at times tempestuous.
As the Vatican’s number two, he is perhaps the candidate best known to the 133 cardinal electors who will enter the Sistine Chapel for the start of the secret conclave on Wednesday.
His role has brought him into contact with cardinals worldwide, both in Rome and during visits to their home countries – a familiarity that could prove crucial in the secretive world of the conclave.
Two cardinals from two African countries, for example, probably know Parolin just as well or even better than they know each other.
Under Pope Francis, who died on April 21, the number of occasions all the world’s cardinals could meet altogether in Rome was limited.
“We have to get to know each other” has been a common refrain to reporters from otherwise tight-lipped cardinals entering and leaving pre-conclave meetings known as “General Congregations”.
Parolin is seen as a quiet diplomat who is pragmatic rather than conservative or progressive. He occasionally had to quietly put out fires caused by the late pope’s remarks.
Francis, an Argentine who was the first pope from the Americas, gave media interviews and sometimes spoke off the cuff in public.
“He (Parolin) knows how to take a punch for the number one and for the institution,” said one cleric currently based abroad who has worked with him and has known him for many years, who asked not to be identified because of the secretive nature of the conclave.
One such recent occasion was when the late Pope suggested last year that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza might amount to genocide. Parolin agreed to meet with the then-Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, Raphael Schutz, who told him that Israel wanted the pope to say more about Israel’s right to defend itself.
When Francis said Ukraine should have the “courage of the white flag” to end the war there, the comment drew widespread criticism from allies of Kyiv but was hailed by Russia. Parolin quietly told diplomats that the pope meant negotiations, not surrender.
Parolin entered the minor seminary when he was 14 and was ordained in 1980. He has spent nearly all of his career in Vatican diplomacy, in Rome and around the world. He has never headed a Catholic diocese, which would have given him more pastoral experience.
But those who know him say this is not a deficit because, in running an organisation as complex as the Vatican’s central administration and representing the pope around the world, he has had many contacts with many members of the faithful.
