Cardinal Parolin, Leader of Papal Conclave, Is Also a Top Candidate

In the days surrounding Pope Francis’ death, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was everywhere.

The No. 2 figure in the Vatican, he visited Francis in the hospital, and then helped seal the papal apartments after the pope died. He welcomed cardinals he knew from around the world to the pope’s funeral, talking to former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy. And leading up to the conclave to pick the next pope, he celebrated an outdoor Mass for tens of thousands of faithful on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.

It seems that everyone knows Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, who will preside over the papal election and who has emerged as the leading compromise candidate before a conclave in which many of the more than 130 cardinals do not know one another.

“The only candidate that for now has emerged with a certain insistence is Parolin,” said Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Sant’Egidio Community, a Catholic group close to Francis. “He represents a continuity,” added Mr. Riccardi, who is close to several cardinals who are considered papal contenders. “He has said, ‘Virtue stands in the middle.’”

A quiet, plodding Italian with a famously inscrutable poker face, Cardinal Parolin is deeply cautious. But at a time of global upheaval, that is not necessarily a disqualifier. Even his backers grant that he lacks Francis’ charisma and global symbolism — but as the leader of the Vatican machinery for the past decade, he enacted Francis’ vision.

Cardinals have talked about Cardinal Parolin as someone who could have a steady, bureaucratic hand on the church’s wheel. And at 70, he could appeal to cardinals who do not want to be stuck too long with the winner.

His critics on the left question his past 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 church’s efforts to make inroads in China, which has required negotiations with Communist leaders.

But few prelates who know him have strong feelings about him either way. And after the eventful and, for some, divisive dozen years under Francis, bland but competent may be just what the cardinals are looking for.

On migration, for example, whereas Francis excoriated the inhumanity of great powers turning the Mediterranean into a graveyard, Cardinal Parolin said after a meeting with Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, that immigration was “a very, very complex subject.”

Some have drawn parallels to the conclave of 1939. With authoritarianism rising and the world order endangered, those cardinals elected Eugenio Pacelli, a Vatican secretary of state who had served as envoy to Germany in the 1920s during the Nazis’ rise. Historians are still divided over whether he, as Pius XII, took an overly diplomatic approach.

And within the church, some liberal Catholics have questioned whether a measured bureaucrat without deep pastoral experience is what the church needs to keep Francis’ inclusive momentum going.

Cardinal Parolin grew up in Schiavon, a small town in the northern Italian region of Veneto that is known as a cradle of popes.

He was raised by his mother, an elementary school teacher, after his father, who owned a hardware store, died in a car accident when the boy was 10.

He entered the minor seminary at 14 and was ordained at 25. But Cardinal Parolin’s career was not on the path of being a pastor, or a diocesan priest. He entered the Pontifical Ecclesiastical 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. Later, he worked in Mexico to restore diplomatic ties. In 1992, he returned to the Vatican, where he joined the powerful Secretariat of State and served on the Italy desk. He later became the director of the Villa Nazareth school for promising students with poor backgrounds, forming connections to young people who would later join Italy’s elite.

But he also acquired baggage on the way.

In 2002, under John Paul II, Cardinal Parolin became the Vatican’s second most important diplomat, focusing on Vietnam, where he helped normalize relations, and on China, which for many in the church is the great challenge of the coming century.

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI tried reconciliation with China, which required its bishops to be loyal to the country’s government rather than to Rome. He chose Cardinal Parolin, who was then an archbishop, to lead the talks over bishops in state-sanctioned churches. The talks stalled.

In 2009, Benedict gave Cardinal Parolin another difficult assignment, as the Vatican’s ambassador to Venezuela, where prelates were in a tense standoff with Hugo Chávez’s leftist government.

The cardinal’s charge in Venezuela was more political than theological, and he employed a style that he would later call “positive neutrality” to press church interests without taking sides between the government and the opposition.

Venezuelans credited Cardinal Parolin — who speaks English, French and near-fluent Spanish with a slight Italian lilt — with easing tensions between the government and the church. It helped that his approach to diplomacy was rather deliberate and discreet, his supporters have said.

His diplomatic focus under Francis extended to the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia and the United States. But China was again a major agenda item as Francis tried anew to improve relations.

Cardinal Parolin helped strike a groundbreaking deal in 2018 that amounted to the first formal recognition of the pope’s authority within the church in China. Conservatives considered it a betrayal for Francis to recognize bishops appointed by the Chinese government who had been previously excommunicated. Sharing any church authority, conservatives argued, created dangerous conditions for the millions of Chinese Catholics who worshiped in underground churches loyal to the pope.

But Francis, and Cardinal Parolin, said it was worth it.

The church had an “attitude of hope, openness and dialogue that we want to continue on both sides,” Cardinal Parolin said in 2023. All the church asked from China, he said, was that “Catholics can be Catholics.”

Perhaps the ultimate sign of Cardinal Parolin’s strength headed into the conclave is an apparent effort to stop him.

American right-wing Catholic publications reported in the days before the papal election that he had fainted during one of the general congregation meetings. The incident never occurred, said Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman.

“It’s not true,” he said.