ROME — Pope Francis on Sept. 26 named Portuguese Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça to go the newly shaped Dicastery for Tradition and Schooling. His nomination is the primary main appointment because the Vatican’s new structure took impact in June, probably setting into movement a sequence of forthcoming management modifications within the Vatican’s central paperwork.

Tolentino, 56, will lead the lately established workplace, shaped as the results of a merger between the Pontifical Council for Tradition and the Congregation for Catholic Schooling. He succeeds Italian Cardinals Gianfranco Ravasi, 79, who has led the Vatican’s tradition workplace since 2007; and Giuseppe Versaldi, 79, who has led the Vatican’s training workplace since 2015. 

The Portuguese cardinal, who’s each a poet and theologian, had been the pinnacle of the Vatican Library since 2018. He was made a cardinal by Francis in 2019.

Beforehand, he served as the primary director of the Nationwide Secretariat of the Pastoral Care of Tradition from 2004 to 2014, a program of the Portuguese Catholic bishops’ convention. From 2011 to 2018, Tolentino was a consultor to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Tradition, and in February 2020, he turned a full member.

In July, he was additionally named as a member of the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican workplace tasked with advising the pontiff on which Catholic monks to nominate as bishops the world over.

Italian Msgr. Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, a professor on the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Household Sciences in Rome, will function his deputy. Pagazzi, 57, can be consultor to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Religion.

In June 2019, the Vatican’s training workplace launched a controversial doc throughout Delight month that blasted trendy gender principle, claiming that it seeks to “annihilate the idea of ‘nature'” and questioned the intentions of those that determine as intersex and transgender.

Archbishop Angelo Vincenzo Zani, who beforehand served as secretary of the Congregation for Schooling, will succeed Tolentino as head of the Vatican archives and library. 

Zani, a 72-year-old Italian prelate, has additionally served within the Roman curia as consultors to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Religion and the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

A number of different main Vatican departments are led by people over the standard retirement age of 75 and have served previous their 5-year mandates, together with Spanish Cardinal Luis Ladaria of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Religion and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet of the Dicastery for Bishops.

Francis met with each Ladaria and Ouellet on Sept. 26, however no personnel modifications have but been introduced for his or her respective places of work.