VATICAN CITY (CNS) — French Cardinal Christophe Pierre, 79, has worked the past 48 years in the Vatican’s diplomatic service, most recently as papal nuncio to the United States for the past nine years.
Before heading to the apostolic nunciature in Washington, he had served nine years as nuncio to Mexico, giving him an in-depth understanding of many issues of concern for both countries, particularly migration and the growing numbers of child migrants from Central America.
When Pope Francis appointed him as nuncio to the United States in 2016, replacing retiring Italian Archbishop Carlo Viganò, Cardinal Pierre worked to explain the pope’s priorities, foster unity in the church in the U.S. and be a dedicated pastor by attending numerous church events, initiatives and talks.
He regularly addressed the U.S. bishops at their spring and fall assemblies, where he repeatedly emphasized the church’s missionary role, particularly the need to bring Christ’s love to the marginalized and his healing to the spiritually wounded.
His high-profile diplomatic assignments, his ease in vastly different social, religious and economic settings and his ability to promote Pope Francis’ vision without alienating church leaders who have been more cautious have landed his name on many observers’ list of potential popes.
He likened his years as apostolic nuncio to being on a journey with the U.S. bishops and facing together the challenges of religious disaffiliation, the sexual abuse crisis, increasing secularization, polarization within the nation and the church, and the global pandemic, he told the bishops at their fall general assembly in 2021.
Echoing Pope Francis’ emphasis on listening, walking and discerning together with the Holy Spirit, he said at the time, “I believe that synodality is an answer to the challenges of our time and to the confrontation, which is threatening to divide this country, and which also has its echoes in the church.”
“It is only through a courageous and humble synodal unity that we, as bishops, will be fully equipped to apply divine power to the problems that weigh heavily on our people today,” he told the bishops at their assembly in June 2023.
Cardinal Pierre has been “a bridge” connecting the U.S. church with the Vatican and “that has helped to break down differences, to bring us together,” Joe Donnelly, the former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, told Catholic News Service in April 2024.
The key to Catholic unity is “not to take refuge in ideologies,” the cardinal told CNS on the eve of his induction into the College of Cardinals in 2023. Trouble comes when important, valid points of Christian faith and morality “become isolated” from one’s living witness of faith and then “we become fighters for ideas.”
For example, Cardinal Pierre said, “I am strongly pro-life but I’m not a defender of the ‘idea’ of life; I am a priest. I am accompanying people,” making sure the defense of life happens “on the ground.”
His job as nuncio has been “to help the church be the church,” he said.
The church exists to help people “make an encounter with another person, Christ,” he said. The church must accompany people in the search for truth “and, again, the truth is not an idea, it’s a person,” Jesus, who frees his disciples from fear.
With nearly 50 years as a diplomat serving all over the world, Cardinal Pierre said, “The life of an apostolic nuncio is the life of a missionary.”
Rather than feeling rootless after living in more than nine countries, he has learned “to find roots everywhere,” he said in his homily at a Mass taking possession of his titular church in Rome in April 2024.
The beauty of traveling and living in so many countries, he said, has been getting to know the local churches, the local people and their cultures, and “because each time it forced me to go outside of myself.”
Born Jan. 30, 1946, in Rennes, France, he spent about 10 years of his early childhood in Madagascar and later served two years in the French military.
Ordained to the priesthood in 1970, he earned degrees in theology and canon law before entering the Vatican diplomatic service in 1977. His first post was at the Vatican nunciature in New Zealand, followed by Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Brazil and then Geneva, serving with the Vatican’s permanent observer mission to U.N. agencies.
St. John Paul II named him an archbishop and nuncio to Haiti in 1995 in the aftermath of a violent military junta and a U.S. and international intervention to restore the government of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was then appointed nuncio to Uganda in 1999, Mexico in 2007 and the United States in 2016. Pope Francis made him a cardinal in 2023.
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