Pietro Cardinal Parente

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Styles of Pietro Cardinal Parente

Reference style	His Eminence
Spoken style	Your Eminence
Informal style	Cardinal
See	Perugia

Pietro Cardinal Parente (born February 16, 1891, Casalnuovo Monterotaro, Italy; died December 29, 1986, Rome, Italy) was a long-serving theologian and inquisitor in the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church. At his peak he was regarded as one of the foremost Italian theologians.

He began his education at the Metropolitan seminary of Benevento in the 1900s and soon moved to Rome to study. His ability as a theologian was very well-known even before he was ordained in 1916, and immediately after ordination he became a seminary rector in Naples, a role he was to hold for a decade, after which Parente transferred to the prestigious Pontifical Lateran University and briefly from 1934 to 1938 to the Pontifical Urbanian Athenaeum. Parente then went back to Naples to found the Faculty of Theology and Canon Law in his former seminary, and he was again rector from 1940 to 1955.

During this period of seminary teaching, Parente wrote frequently for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Parente gained a reputation for his strongly-worded, almost blunt, style of communicating official Church doctrine - something for which he is remembered by almost all those who studied under him. He was the first writer to use the term "new theology" to describe the writings of Marie-Dominique Chenu and Louis Charlier in that paper in 1942, and was influential behind the encyclical Humani Generis that condemned those theologians eight years later. He was the assessor of most of the cases done by the Holy Office during these years.

Parente became archbishop of the see of Perugia in 1955 but curiously (given that Leo XIII was elected pope from that diocese as recently as 1878) was not promoted to the cardinalate in any of John XXIII's five consistories. Although tending towards outspoken conservatism, Parente participated in the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965 and Pope John had made him one of the highest-ranking assessors in the Holy Office in 1959. When it was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965 Parente became secretary but was undoubtedly viewed by Paul VI as too outspoken in personality to gain the job of prefect - which was given to the lesser-known but friendly and tactful Yugoslav Franjo Seper. He did not in any case hold his position for very long, but Parente was elevated to the cardinalate at long last on June 26, 1967.

However, although his knowledge and ability was still seen as very valuable in later years, Parente's days as one of the foremost assesors in the Vatican had largely gone by the time he became a cardinal. He was originally highly dubious about the Vatican rehabilitating Galileo during the Vatican Council, but was less opposed to it by the time John Paul II officially did so in 1979, and he spoke at the age of 91 on the 1700th anniversary of the conversion of Armenia to Christianity in an effort to unite the Roman and Armenian Churches. Because he was over 80 at the time of the next conclave after becoming a cardinal, Pietro Parente never voted in the election of a pope - almost becoming the first cardinal not faced with political or health obstacles to do so, for he turned eighty just two months after Ingravescentem aetatem ws published.

When he died on the third-last day of 1986, he was the oldest cardinal still alive two months shy of his ninety-sixth birthday.