The apostolic nuncio to Great Britain will leave his post after just over two years, to become the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Eastern Churches.
Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti will succeed the 79-year-old Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, who has headed the dicastery since 2007.
The dicastery is responsible for the 23 Eastern Churches in communion with Rome, including the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Syro-Malabar Church and the Maronite Church.
Pope Francis named the Italian-born Archbishop Gugerotti as the Holy See’s ambassador to Great Britain on 4 July 2020. His academic background is in eastern liturgy: he studied Oriental Languages and Literature at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice and received a doctorate in Oriental Ecclesiastical Sciences from the Pontifical Oriental Institute.
He was a professor Patristics, Eastern Liturgy at the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in his native Verona from 1981 to 1985.
He has since served in the Vatican’s diplomatic service, including at the dicastery’s predecessor, the Congregation for Oriental Churches, of which he became undersecretary in 1997.
Archbishop Gugerotti’s appointments have included nunciatures in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. He was made apostolic nuncio to Belarus by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, and to Ukraine by Pope Francis in 2015.
In an interview with The Tablet earlier this year, Archbishop Gugerotti responded to criticism of Pope Francis’s comments on the war in Ukraine, saying that Vatican diplomacy needed to offer mediation in the world’s “desert of moral figures”.
“The goal of the Holy See is always to be an extreme possibility when all other choices have expired,” he said.
Commentators suggest that his experience of post-Soviet politics is pertinent to his new appointment. As nuncio to Georgia, Archbishop Gugerotti was present in Tbilisi during the Russian invasion in 2008, and during his tenure in Belarus visited political prisoners and negotiated directly with the country’s dictatorial president Aleksandr Lukashenko.
In 2020, he acted as a special envoy to negotiate the return to Minsk of the exiled Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, who had been barred from returning to the country for several months.
His five years as nuncio to Ukraine were dominated by the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in the Donbas. He visited the region, and in 2018 was responsible for the distribution of €16 million raised by a papal collection across Europe for Ukrainians.
At a rally in Trafalgar Square in March this year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Archbishop Gugerotti addressed a thousands-strong protest: “Today we are all Ukrainians, all in solidarity with you.” He also offered prayers in English and Ukrainian.
During his time in the UK, he expressed repeated concerns about the plight of migrants, visiting asylum seekers housed in Napier Barracks and presenting a blessing from Pope Francis.
The bishops of England and Wales have asked for prayers for Archbishop Gugerotti “as he prepares to serve the Roman Curia in this important role”.
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