VATICAN CITY — The new Vatican No. 2 was a no-show Tuesday at the ceremony to take over the reins of the Holy See administration, after being hospitalized for urgent surgery on the day he was to have begun charting a new course for the troubled Vatican bureaucracy.
Pope Francis told the assembled guests at Tuesday’s handover ceremony that Archbishop Pietro Parolin had had to undergo minor but urgent surgery and would be out for several weeks. Parolin was hospitalized while visiting his family in Italy’s Veneto region, the Vatican said.
Parolin missed out on the ceremonial changing of the guard from the retiring Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who left his post after seven tumultuous years in which he was blamed for many of the gaffes and problems of the papacy of Benedict XVI.
Francis welcomed Parolin “in absentia” as he thanked Bertone for his service, noting the difficulties and “thorns” that Bertone had endured.
“I want to thank you for the courage and patience with which you lived through the setbacks that you had to confront,” Francis said. “There were a lot.”
Bertone’s departure represented a tangible sign of change for the Vatican following his scandal-marred term, which climaxed with the 2012 theft of Benedict’s papers by his butler — a theft aimed at discrediting Bertone by airing the Vatican’s dirty laundry
But many other problems of Benedict’s reign, from his rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop to the Vatican’s initial, flat-footed response to the 2010 explosion of clerical sex abuse cases, were blamed on Bertone’s administrative shortcomings.
A canon lawyer from Genoa, Bertone had no diplomatic experience when he was named the Vatican’s top diplomat in 2006 by Benedict, who clearly wanted a faithful servant as his No. 2 administrator. Bertone had served as then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s deputy when both were concerned with doctrinal issues at the Vatican’s orthodoxy watchdog.
In his final weeks on the job, the 78-year-old Bertone made clear he didn’t appreciate the finger-pointing, telling reporters last month that he had been victim of a “plot by crows and vipers” to bring him down.
While admitting to some problems, he said overall he judged his tenure “positively.”
New popes usually bring with them a new secretary of state, so a changing of the guard under Francis is altogether to be expected, particularly given the mandate given Francis by the cardinals who elected him to reform the dysfunctional Vatican bureaucracy. What’s remarkable is that Francis had decided on Parolin just days after being elected, according to one of Francis’ closest advisers, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga.
And yet Francis and Parolin had only met once before, when Parolin, 58, was deputy foreign minister under Bertone — a job he held until he was sent to be the Holy See’s ambassador to Venezuela in 2009.
“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,” Parolin told Venezuela’s El Universal newspaper.