ROME — Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, and Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, his deputy, have tested positive for the coronavirus, reports veteran Vatican journalist Edward Pentin.
“Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra have both tested positive for COVID-19 Vatican sources have confirmed, with Cardinal Parolin showing symptoms,” Pentin wrote on his Twitter account Monday night.
“The Vatican Secretary of State and his deputy have both had two vaccine doses and the booster shot,” he added.
Cardinal Parolin is the architect of the Vatican’s extremely strict coronavirus regulations, which require all employees and visitors to present a vaccine passport (“super green pass”) in order to access the Vatican territory.
In late December, Cardinal Parolin eliminated the possibility of employees presenting a negative coronavirus test to gain access to their place of work, mandating proof of vaccination or recovery from the coronavirus disease in order to be admitted.
Commenters on social media were swift to point out that Pope Francis snarkily said it was “ironic” when conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was believed to be unvaccinated, contracted the coronavirus in 2021.
“In the College of Cardinals, there are a few deniers. One of them, poor fellow, contracted the virus,” Francis told reporters as he flew home from a trip to Slovakia last September. “Hey, the ironies of life.”
The pope added that in the heart of the Vatican, “everyone is vaccinated, with the exception of a small group, and we are looking into ways to help them.”
Last week, Francis asserted that vaccines are the “most reasonable solution” to the coronavirus, contending that people who opt out of the vaccines are acting on “baseless information or poorly documented facts.”
It is “important to continue the effort to immunize the general population as much as possible,” the pope told the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, which calls for “a manifold commitment on the personal, political and international levels.”
“Each of us has a responsibility to care for ourselves and our health, and this translates into respect for the health of those around us,” Francis asserted. “Health care is a moral obligation.”
“Sadly, we are finding increasingly that we live in a world of strong ideological divides,” he said. “Frequently people let themselves be influenced by the ideology of the moment, often bolstered by baseless information or poorly documented facts.”
“Every ideological statement severs the bond of human reason with the objective reality of things,” he stated. “The pandemic, on the other hand, urges us to adopt a sort of ‘reality check’ that makes us confront the problem head on and adopt suitable remedies to resolve it.”
“Vaccines are not a magical means of healing, yet surely they represent, in addition to other treatments that need to be developed, the most reasonable solution for the prevention of the disease,” he contended.
The Vatican’s Secretary of State and his deputy, or sostituto, are two of the most powerful figures in the Roman Curia, generally considered the number 2 and 3 men after the pope himself.