Agostino Casaroli

Agostino Casaroli was the Vatican diplomat who spent twenty years travelling to Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and Belgrade to negotiate with communist governments over the appointment of bishops, was called the Vatican's Kissinger and by his critics its Chamberlain, and as John Paul II's secretary of state watched the governments he had negotiated with fall; his defence, in the memoir he called the martyrdom of patience, was that a church without bishops has nothing to bargain with later. He was born in 1914 at Castel San Giovanni near Piacenza, the son of a tailor, entered the papal diplomatic academy in 1937 and never held a parish; he spent the war years at the Secretariat of State and the 1950s as the specialist on Latin America, and in 1961 John XXIII sent him to Vienna to a UN conference, where the first contacts with the East were made. From 1963 he was in Budapest, where the Hungarian government and the Holy See signed in 1964 the first agreement any communist state had made with Rome, on the oath of loyalty and the naming of bishops. The price was Cardinal Mindszenty, who had been in the American embassy since 1956 and whom Casaroli eventually persuaded to leave in 1971 and Paul VI removed from his see in 1974, which the old cardinal never forgave. Yugoslavia restored relations in 1970. Poland, where the church was strong enough to need no help, got a different treatment, and it was Casaroli who arranged the visit of 1979 that changed the country. He signed the Helsinki Final Act for the Holy See in 1975, the first international treaty it had signed since the Lateran Pacts. John Paul II, who had been on the other side of his tables in Kraków, made him cardinal and secretary of state in 1979, and he negotiated the revised concordat with Italy in 1984 that ended Catholicism as the state religion. He retired in 1990 and spent his last years visiting a juvenile prison in Rome every Sunday, which he had done quietly for years. He died in June 1998.

• Lived: 1914 CE – 1998 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: cardinal, diplomat

Related

• The Cold War
• Paul VI's Vatican Ostpolitik — Opening to Communist States