Cardinal Angelo Raffaele Sodano, GCC (23 November 1927 – 27 May 2022)

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, one of the most central figures in the John Paul II papacy, died Friday at the age of 94. Pope Francis attended his funeral as did other influential Vatican churchmen.

But Sodano was also central to some of the most troubling moments and choices in the Church’s 20th century history. The cardinal protected notorious abuser Marcel Maciel, was an outspoken supporter of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and was a staunch defender of the controversial Ostpolitik Vatican foreign policy.

The Pillar reports:

Sodano was Vatican Secretary of State under Pope St. John Paul and Pope Benedict XVI he was also dean of the College of Cardinals for nearly 15 years, the first cardinal to serve simultaneously as Secretary of State and dean of the college.

Sodano served in the 1970s and 1980s as apostolic nuncio to Chile, during much the period in which dictator Augusto Pinochet ruled the country. The cardinal was an ardent and sometimes outspoken supporter of Pinochet, despite the dictator’s human rights abuses, and was critical of Catholic-led protest movements against the Pinochet government.

Sodano was also a prominent champion of Vatican engagement with the Communist government of China, even at the expense of long standing diplomatic ties. In 1999, the cardinal claimed that the Holy See would close its embassy in Taiwan “not tomorrow, but today” if it was the price of establishing diplomatic relations with the mainland.

The cardinal was accused in 2010 of blocking a Vatican investigation into Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, who was accused in 1995 of serially sexually abusing seminarians. While Groër resigned his position as Archbishop of Vienna that year, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn alleged in 2010 that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would have conducted a canonical criminal investigation into the allegations had it not been for Sodano's intervention.

Sodano clashed with Benedict over this issue several times over the years. In 1995, they fell out over how to deal with Groer, who resigned as Archbishop of Vienna after being accused of molesting young men.

Benedict advised the then Pope, John Paul II, to issue an apology over the appalling allegations, which were later proven. Sodano, as the Vatican’s Secretary of State, chose to over-rule him.
Groër was stripped of the rights and duties of a cardinal in 1998, but died in 2003 without having faced any formal investigation for his alleged sexual abuse.

Sodano also blocked Vatican investigations into Legion of Christ founder Marcel Maciel, who was eventually found to have serially sexually abused minor seminarians, young priests, and numerous women around the globe, to have fathered children, and to have been a drug addict for decades.

After Sodano was asked to resign as Vatican Secretary of State one year into Benedict XVI’s papacy, a thorough investigation into Maciel found the cleric was “devoid of any scruples and authentic sense of religion.”

The cardinal has been accused of defending other priests and bishops facing serial sexual abuse, cover-up, or negligence charges, and of advising Pope Francis that allegations against Chilean Bishop Juan Barros were concocted by political enemies of the Church.

And in the late 1990s and early 2000s Sodano played a key role in communications between the Vatican and American bishops over sexual abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick; Sodano has been accused of providing incomplete information to Pope John Paul II on allegations against McCarrick, or otherwise ignoring complaints.

In recent years, Sodano had declined comments to press inquiries about those allegations.

Sodano was elected dean of the College of Cardinals in 2005, and remained in the position for nearly 15 years. But in December 2019, Pope Francis accepted Sodano’s resignation as dean - the senior cardinal who summons and presides over a conclave to elect a new pope.

Sodano was deeply implicated in power moves surrounding Pope Benedict XVI's resignation. Although he lost little time in expressing his ‘sense of loss and almost disbelief’ at Benedict’s decision to quit, telling reporters that the announcement felt ‘like a lightning bolt in a clear blue sky’, Vatican insiders immediately smelt a rat. Far from being surprised at Benedict’s announcement, Sodano had been told the previous Friday. And far from a ‘sense of loss’, previous form suggests the ambitious cardinal would have been delighted at the news.

Indeed, at the time there was a great deal of evidence that they were at odds. Months after Benedict became Pope, Sodano resigned as the Vatican’s Secretary of State, its most senior political and diplomatic post, after 12 years in the high-profile job.

Several Vatican insiders, including Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, said Sodano learned of the coming resignation in Benedict’s private quarters the previous Friday.

Though held in secret, reports in the Italian press claimed there was a heated argument between the two men over the fraught question of how the Church should deal with clergy accused of sexual abuse.

Pope Benedict always took a hard line on dealing with paedophile priests: he apologised publicly to victims and insisted that the Vatican, rather than individual dioceses, should be in charge of investigating future abuse complaints, referring them to the police whenever possible.

Sodano argued against this strategy. The cardinal was reluctant to proceed with investigations into suspect priests over the years, and famously used a prayer during Easter Mass in 2010 to describe the complaints of victims of abuse as ‘petty gossip’.

Then, in 1998, Sodano instructed Benedict — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — to drop an investigation into multiple counts of abuse by Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder The Legionaries of Christ. A Catholic journal uncovered evidence that Sodano had issued the order after receiving $15,000 from the order for being its ‘cheerleader’.

Benedict waited eight years for revenge. In 2006, he removed Maciel from his post. Sodano’s resignation from Vatican Secretary of State came soon afterwards.

Former Irish minister for foreign affairs Dermot Ahern revealed in 2018 that Sodano pressured him in 2004 to "indemnify the Catholic Church against legal actions for compensation by clerical child sexual-abuse survivors" in Ireland, which Ahern refused.

Yet while it seems Sodano had several reasons to seek the Pope’s resignation, that doesn’t necessarily mean he had the ability to execute such an audacious plot.

A hostile cardinal seeking to bring down a Pope would have to unearth a catastrophically devastating scandal from his past.

But despite many attempts to find an avenue of attack and eight years of blistering scrutiny from the media left no mud sticking to the German pontiff.

Did Sodano stumble on a scandal? It seems unlikely.

‘Maybe an unpleasant meeting with Sodano pushed him over the edge,’ says a veteran insider. ‘The Vatileaks scandal showed the place to be completely dysfunctional. It’s been that way throughout history.’


Pray for Cardinal Sodano's soul.