Angelo Sodano - Apostolic Nuncio

Apostolic Nuncio

On 30 November 1977, Sodano, who speaks English and German, as well as Spanish, French and Italian, was appointed a titular archbishop of Nova Caesaris and the apostolic nuncio to Chile, one of the countries where he had served as nunciature secretary. He was ordained a bishop in his native Asti by Cardinal Antonio Samoré on 15 January 1978.

He arrived at a difficult moment, with Chile on the brink of war with Argentina over the Beagle Channel and Augusto Pinochet in power.

In 1980, together with Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, he tried without success to get Pinochet to allow the return of certain political exiles, and in 1984 he obtained, at the cost of a dispute between the Holy See and the military government of Chile, safe conduct for four members of the Revolutionary Left Movement, who had sought diplomatic asylum in the nunciature, to leave for Ecuador.

In 1987, when Pope John Paul II visited Chile, Pinochet availed of the visit that the Pope regularly paid to a country's head of state to get the Pope to appear with him at a balcony of the presidential palace, although this was not in the agreed programme. On the other hand, Sodano arranged a meeting in the nunciature between the Pope and the leaders of the opposition.

Seven Chilean priests then wrote to the Pope to have Sodano removed from his post as Nuncio. What the Pope did in fact in the following year was to appoint Sodano the Holy See's Secretary of the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church, a post corresponding to that of a foreign minister, and on 1 December 1990 named him to the highest post in the Roman Curia, that of Secretary of State, creating him Cardinal-Priest of the titular church of S. Maria Nuova on 28 June 1991.

On 27 December 1998, he wrote, at the request of the democratic government of Chile, an official letter to the British prime minister Tony Blair stating that "the Chilean Government considers it an offence to its territorial sovereignty as a nation the fact of being deprived of the power to judge its own citizens" through the detention of Pinochet in Britain.