Vatican press office provides unprecedented billing for Sostituto

July 16, 2024

In an unprecedented move, the Holy See Press Office has published, in recent daily bulletins, an address and a homily given by Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra during a trip to Honduras—thus offering him billing typically reserved to the Roman Pontiffs.

In its daily bollettino, the Holy See Press Office publishes papal texts, major curial texts, notices of papal audiences and episcopal appointments, and transcripts of some Vatican press conferences. On very rare occasions, it has published an address or a homily by the Secretary of State.

As the Sostituto (officially, the Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State), Archbishop Peña Parra coordinates the internal affairs of the Roman Curia and reports to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

The Holy See Press Office’s unprecedented decision to highlight Archbishop Peña Parra’s address and homily comes less than two weeks after he testified in a London courtroom that he knowingly approved a false invoice in a bid to extract the Vatican from a London real-estate deal.

In 2023, Archbishop Peña Parra testified before a Vatican City court that he “ordered unsanctioned electronic spying on the phone of the director general of the IOR” [Vatican bank], The Pillar reported. His statements, according to The Pillar, “appear to show him boasting that he could, did, and would again, use his position to co-opt the organs of law enforcement for illegal surveillance operations if and when he personally deemed it necessary.”

Earlier, in 2019, Archbishop Peña Parra intervened in the Zanchetta affair, providing a document that swayed a judge to permit the Argentine bishop, later convicted of sexually abusing seminarians, to leave his native country over a prosecutor’s objections.

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