Cardinal Pierre turns 80 on Friday. Who will follow him?

The long-serving apostolic nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, turns 80 on Friday. While the cardinal’s replacement may take a few days, or even a week to be announced by the Holy See, there is no doubt that the guard will soon be changed.

Media reports continue to speculate on who might be named to replace Pierre in one of the Vatican’s most senior and visible diplomatic postings — one made all the more sensitive by the ascension of the second Trump administration and the election of the first American pope last year.

While nothing is certain until the official announcement, some names have emerged as rumored or theorized front runners — among them current Vatican sostituto Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra — even if there appears little to recommend the logic of their prospective appointments.

Meanwhile, other, less remarked upon candidates appear to be more intuitive choices, with one in particular, Archbishop Gabriele Giordano Caccia, the Vatican’s current delegate to the United Nations, seemingly the most obvious candidate by the logic of the Vatican.

The final choice, of course, rests — or rested, since it has most likely been made already — with Pope Leo. In making his selection, the pope will also signal how he sees his home nation, both diplomatically and pastorally, and how he intends to engage with it.

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Cardinal Pierre arrived at the apostolic nunciature on Washington D.C.’s Massachusetts Ave. in 2016, replacing the already controversial, though not yet seismically so, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.

As he arrived, Pierre was met with uncertainty from some American bishops and Church-watchers, who were concerned about what his record in Mexico City, his prior appointment, might foreshadow. When Pope Francis visited Mexico in 2016, he gave a controversial speech taken as a sharp rebuke of the Mexican bishops — and Pierre was widely seen as the architect of that speech, with journalist Andrea Tornielli, who later became a Vatican official, among those suggesting as much.

Some observers wondered if that controversy would portend a tense relationship between Pierre and the U.S. episcopate, and whether the archbishop would be able to help strengthen the relationship between American bishops and Pope Francis.

But at the Secretariat of State, Pierre was seen as a much more conservative pick — in the diplomatic sense — than his predecessor, likely to be a more stable and reliable bridge between the Vatican and Washington.

A seasoned nuncio in often sensitive ambassadorial assignments, Pierre arrived just ahead of the election of Donald Trump later that year, with many at the time expecting him to put much of his focus on managing the Vatican’s relationship with the incoming administration.

Instead, he set about aiming his attention at internal Church affairs, taking U.S. bishops to task for what he saw as a lukewarm, or hostile, reception to the 2016 Francis exhortation Amoris laetitia.

Following the McCarrick scandal of 2018, the initially explosive allegations and then unhinged statements from his predecessor Vigano, and the Holy See’s intervention to block a vote during the 2018 U.S. bishops’ conference meeting, Pierre’s tenure became defined by his internal relations with the U.S. bishops, with him engaging or speaking hardly at all with the politics of the Trump and Biden administrations.

Cardinal Pierre’s tenure as nuncio in the U.S. became, in large part, defined by context and character. To many, he has served as a consummate internal ecclesiastical diplomat, serving for nearly a decade as Pope Francis’ pointman to the U.S. bishops, hammering home the pope’s priorities and expectations on subjects like synodality.

But critics have consigned a tendency by Pierre to come off as high-handed in his dealings with bishops, and at times impatient with or even slightly disdainful of American culture. Still, the most frequently voiced criticism of Pierre amongst the U.S. episcopate — albeit sotto voce — was that he appeared to buy into a narrative that the bishops were, as a body, dispositionally hostile to Pope Francis, and in some instances that he helped to cement that impression in Rome.

In part because of the time in which he served, the nuncio also occupied a larger place in Catholic consciousness than most papal diplomats do. In the wake of the McCarrick scandal, news coverage pointed to his failure to respond to a letter from Tennessee priests asking for help with a crisis in their diocese, and his American implementation of Vos estis lux mundi was broadly criticized for an emphasis on secrecy in a process meant to demonstrate transparency.

Amid a broad call for ecclesiastical reform on issues related to abuse and coercion, Pierre gained a popular reputation for prioritizing institutional self-protection over solidarity and support for possible victims, lay or clerical.

At the same time, notably Pierre kept himself above factionalism within the USCCB; if he often appeared at odds publicly with conference leadership, he was equally known to be privately in friction with figures like Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago over episcopal appointments in Rome — a dynamic well understood by the then-prefect as the Dicastery for Bishops, Cardinal Robert Prevost.

Prevost’s election as Pope Leo XIV, and the advent of the second Trump administration, likely changes dramatically the calculus for what kind of nuncio the new pope will want or need.

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The first American pope, one with a native cultural understanding of the Church in the U.S. and a recent ring-side seat to the dynamics of the episcopacy there, will likely see far less need than Francis did for an ecclesiastical enforcer-in-chief from his man in Washington.

At the same time, while Leo can hardly hope to escape entirely direct questions about the Trump administration’s actions at home and abroad, he will likely need a nuncio who can operate as a diplomatic distancer, someone who can create breathing space and room for all parties to maneuver between the triangle of Pope Leo, the White House, and the USCCB.

With the cardinal turning 80 this week, discussion of who would follow Pierre in Washington has percolated for the last two years. But the factors involved have changed after the death of Francis and the election of Leo; a fact not entirely digested by some Church watchers and prognosticators.

In 2024, the two most interesting potential candidates were Archbishop Giovanni d’Aniello, and Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the pope’s effective chief of staff.

D’Aniello comes from a faultless diplomatic pedigree and currently serves as nuncio to the Russian Federation. Two years ago, as Pope Francis made it a key diplomatic priority for the Holy See to help negotiate between Moscow and Washington over the war in Ukraine, he was quietly touted in some corners of the Secretariat of State as a natural choice — someone who could understand and speak across the conflict’s divide and had experience dealing with sensitive political situations.

Fast forward to 2026, though, and while D’Aniello’s remains qualified for the role, he is now also 71, and with Leo signalling a preference for a return to the normal ages of ecclesiastical retirement, that presents an issue.

It’s also true that the Trump administration’s newly-interventionist foreign policy in Latin America has increased calls for the next nuncio to have direct familiarity with the situation in that region.

The U.S. capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro has especially seen commentators pushing the prospective candidacy of Archbishop Peña Parra, himself a Venezuelan and, within the walls of the Vatican, an outspoken opinion holder on South American affairs.

Ironically, although Peña Parra has been slated to move on from his role as sostituto for some time, and was at one point seriously mooted at the highest levels in Rome as a replacement for Cardinal Pierre, he has not been under consideration for U.S. nuncio since the death of Pope Francis.

The notion of moving Peña Parra to Washington came about under Pope Francis because of a widespread understanding that the archbishop’s entanglement in the Secretariat of State’s financial scandal and trial would impede him from the customary promotion to lead a dicastery.

As such, there have been numerous conversations about securing the archbishop a “top-tier” diplomatic posting, which would see him removed from senior Vatican leadership without it being an explicit firing or demotion from his current role — a golden diplomatic parachute, as it were.

Francis was, according to some inside the Secretariat of State, not over concerned about how Peña Parra could be received in the U.S., despite the archbishop’s admission of illegal electronic espionage and notable — and equally illegal — attempts to see a prominent and laicized sexual abuser reinstated to the clergy.

But according to those close to the conversation within the Secretariat of State in Rome, Pope Leo has at no point shown interest in the idea, with insiders saying the new pope is much more reflexive...

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