Il Tempo opens its Saturday, September 5 edition with a headline that will not go unnoticed in Madrid: \u00abChi sostituir\u00e0 Parolin. Tutti italiani i tre i nunzi apostolici prediletti da Papa Leone XIV. In pole Piero Pioppo\u00bb. According to Vatican expert Francesco Capozza, the Pope already has a shortlist of three apostolic nuncios, all Italian, to replace Cardinal Pietro Parolin at the head of the Secretariat of State, with the frontrunner being the current Apostolic Nuncio to Spain and Andorra, Monsignor Piero Pioppo.<\/p>\n
The report, published on page 11 of the Roman daily, follows up on an article from August 19 in which the same journalist revealed that Leo XIV would keep Parolin \u201cfor at least another twelve months\u201d before choosing his new \u201cprime minister\u201d from among the nuncios \u201cfor whom he has personal affection.\u201d At that time, Capozza mentioned only one name: Monsignor Paolo Rudelli, recently appointed Substitute for General Affairs in place of Edgar Pe\u00f1a Parra. Now he expands the list to three candidates and places Pioppo at the top.<\/p>\n
A replacement that would not be immediate<\/p>\n
Il Tempo itself acknowledged in August that replacing Parolin is no easy task. The Secretary of State is 71, the same age as the Pontiff, and has three and a half years left until retirement, making it difficult to find him a position commensurate with his rank. The solution Leo XIV appears to be considering is to appoint him Dean of the College of Cardinals, a post the newspaper says Parolin already had virtually in hand in January 2025 and which Francis blocked at the time.<\/p>\n
Capozza also notes that, fifteen months after the Conclave, the central government of the Church remains in the hands of prelates and cardinals appointed by Bergoglio, and that Leo XIV is deliberately adopting a slow pace in Curia changes. The succession at the Secretariat of State would, in any case, be the most significant decision of his pontificate to date.<\/p>\n
The nuncio S\u00e1nchez tried to veto<\/p>\n
The name Piero Pioppo is especially significant for Spain. His appointment as nuncio in Madrid, made public on September 15, 2025, came after nearly six months of obstruction by Pedro S\u00e1nchez\u2019s government, which resisted granting the placet to a diplomat it considered \u201cpersona non grata\u201d because of his conservative profile. It was Il Tempo itself that exposed that standoff, which ended with the government yielding to the Pope\u2019s insistence. Pioppo arrived in Madrid on December 5, 2025, and presented his credentials to the King on December 18.<\/p>\n
Born in Savona in 1960 and incardinated in the diocese of Acqui Terme, Pioppo entered the Holy See\u2019s diplomatic service in 1993. He served in the nunciatures of Korea and Chile and in the Section for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, where he was Cardinal Angelo Sodano\u2019s closest collaborator. In 2006 he was appointed prelate of the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called \u201cVatican bank,\u201d a post he held for four years. In 2010 Benedict XVI elevated him to the episcopate and sent him as nuncio to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea; he later represented the Holy See in Indonesia and to ASEAN, a posting many interpreted as a deliberate distancing decided by Francis. Organizing the papal trip to Jakarta in September 2024 restored him to the Argentine Pontiff\u2019s favor and paved the way for his transfer to Madrid.<\/p>\n
If Il Tempo\u2019s forecasts prove correct, the nuncio whom the Spanish government tried to shut out a year ago would become the Holy See\u2019s number two. The Madrid Nunciature has traditionally been a stepping-stone to the cardinalate; becoming a direct springboard to the Secretariat of State would be an unprecedented development in recent times.<\/p>\n
For the moment, neither the Holy See nor the Nunciature in Spain has commented on these reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Il Tempo opens its Saturday, September 5 edition with a headline that will not go unnoticed in Madrid:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-81167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}