Pope Francis has appointed 67-year-old Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti dean of the Department for Oriental Churches, to replace Cardinal Leonardo Sandri who is leaving office due to age of majority.
After 15 years, the time has come for a change of dean of the Department of Oriental Churches. Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, who has just turned 79 – appointed Dean of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches by Pope Benedict XVI in June 2007, and reconfirmed by Pope Francis in 2014 – leaves the office, which Archbishop Claudio will assume from mid-January Gugerotti, 67 years old.
Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti was born in Verona in 1955. He joined the Pious Society of Don Nicola Mazza and was ordained a priest in 1982. He graduated in Oriental Languages and Literature at the “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice , a degree in Liturgy from the Pontifical Institute of Sant’Anselmo in Rome and a PhD in Oriental Ecclesiastical Sciences from the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. He also taught at the universities of Venice, Padua and Rome, as well as at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Oriental Institute.
It was the then Congregation for the Oriental Churches, the current Dicastery for the Oriental Churches, that baptized Monsignor Gugerotti in his service to the Holy See, which began in 1985, and which in 1997 led him to become deputy secretary of the same congregation. He was Consultor of Pontifical Liturgical Ceremonies from 1990 to 2001, the year in which he was elected Archbishop Emeritus of Ravello, after which he was ordained Bishop by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Then, to devote himself to service in papal embassies around the world, he held the position of papal nuncio in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI sent him to Belarus, while Pope Francis sent him to Ukraine in 2015 and then to Great Britain in 2020.
In addition to numerous articles, Monsignor Gugerotti is the author of various volumes that summarize his experience and his studies, including the Armenian Liturgical Rites of Siama and the Cilician Period. Liturgical consequences for a theology of inter-confessional communion (Rome 2001); The New Man is a Liturgical Object (Rome 2005), also translated into Romanian and Ukrainian, The Caucasus and Periphery (Rome 2012) and Reflections from the East (Bose 2012).
