Matters India Reporter
New Delhi: Pope Francis on March 13 appointed Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli, an Italian prelate, as the new apostolic nuncio to India.
The appointment was announced at noon Rome time, corresponding to 4:30 pm in India.
Archbishop Girelli was the nuncio to Israel and Cyprus and apostolic delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine until now, according to Archbishop Felix Anthony Machado of Vasai, the secretary general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.
He succeeds Archbishop Giambattista Diquattro, another Italian who was transferred to Brazil, South America, in August 2020.
Archbishop o Girelli was born in Predore (Bergamo), Italy, on March 13, 1953. He was ordained a priest on June 17, 1978. He speaks Italian, English and French.
With a doctorate in Theology, he entered the Vatican Diplomatic Service on July 13, 1987. To prepare for the diplomatic service, he completed the course of study at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in 1984.
He served nunciatures in Cameroon and in New Zealand, in the Section for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, and in the nunciature in the United States of America.
On April 13, 2006, he was appointed Apostolic Nuncio to Indonesia and, on October 10, 2006, to East Timor. On January 13, 2011, he was appointed nuncio to Singapore, apostolic delegate to Malaysia and to Brunei, and non-residential Pontifical Representative for Vietnam.
On September 13, 2017, he became the nuncio to Israel and apostolic delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine. Two days later, he was appointed nuncio to Cyprus.
As nuncio to Israel, Archbishop Girelli pointed out the Catholic Church’s consistent engagement in the challenging journey of transforming negative images into positive ones, reinterpreting texts used to legitimate the teaching of contempt and finding new texts that can promote a teaching of respect.
“Thanks to this journey, Pope Francis was adamant in proclaiming at his first official meeting with a Jewish delegation as Pope on June 24, 2013, “a Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” the archbishop recalled while addressing the plenary session of Knesset, the unicameral national legislature of Israel, on March 21, 2018.
According to him, the origin of “Nostra Aetate” (In Our Time), the Vatican document on the Church’s attitudes towards non-Christian religions, was a short private audience of French Jewish historian Jules Isaac with Pope John XXIII, on June 13, 1960.
“During that encounter, Isaac presented the Pope with a dossier of materials based on Isaac’s extensive wartime research into the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, in the hopes that this documentation could help to spur the upcoming Second Vatican Council and initiate a substantial change in Catholic attitudes towards Jews and Judaism. Isaac asked the Pope to help transform a “teaching of contempt” into a “teaching of respect,” Archbishop Girelli said.
The Vatican document published in 1965 is now regarded as the key building-block in the re-orienting of contemporary Christian attitudes towards Jews.
Although its longest paragraph is dedicated to the Jewish people, it also stresses the need for dialogue with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and the other world religions.
The archbishop said he shared the Pope’s call to urgently “to educate young generations to become actively involved in the struggle against hatred and discrimination, but also in the overcoming of conflicting positions in the past, and never to grow tired of seeking the other.”
The prelate also recalled that the Pope call to prepare a truly human future. For this, “rejecting evil is not enough; we need to build the common good together.”