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Office Christianity

Cardinal Secretary of State

Cardinalis Secretarius Status la

Presides over Secretariat of State of the Holy See

  • Dated from 20 November 1551 CE
  • Also called Secretary of State of His Holiness The Pope

A seat,
and those
who held it.

Holders in order

Overview

From Wikipedia, quoted unmodified under CC BY-SA 4.0; the article’s history is its list of authors.

Succession in office

Who held it, in order

A sequence of office-holders, not a family genealogy.

  • 21 holders
  • 6 gaps
  • 6 steps named in the records
  • 7 undated
What this means

Who held an office after whom. Not parentage, not discipleship, and not universally recognised — offices are contested.

Does not imply recognition by every tradition · an uncontested claim · parentage · discipleship · an explanation of why the succession happened

Holding an office after someone says nothing about being related to them or taught by them. Where a line is also a family, both are on the holders’ own pages as separate sections.

A gap is a vacancy, an interregnum or a hole in the record; an overlap is rival claims or an office held by more than one at once. The records do not say which, so neither is resolved here. A gap shorter than two years sits inside the precision of year-dated records and is not marked.

Why a succession happened is a historical argument. Where sources make one, it belongs in a reviewed connection with its citations — not in this order, and not in a predecessor field.

Recognition is never universal. Where a card names no recognising body, none is recorded — which is not the same as none.

Imported from Wikidata unless a card says otherwise. Nothing here has been read by an editor.

  1. 1560 CE – 1584 CE Charles Borromeo Italian Catholic prelate (1538–1584)
  2. Gap about 21 years with no holder recorded

    1605 CE – 1621 CE Scipione Borghese 17th-century Catholic cardinal (1576-1633)
  3. Gap about 79 years with no holder recorded

    1700 CE – 1721 CE Fabrizio Paolucci Catholic cardinal (1651-1726)
  4. Gap about 3 years with no holder recorded

    1724 CE – 1726 CE Fabrizio Paolucci Catholic cardinal (1651-1726)
  5. Gap about 63 years with no holder recorded

    14 October 1789 CE – 1 August 1796 CE Francesco Saverio de Zelada Spanish cardinal (1717-1801) Has references
  6. Gap about 107 years with no holder recorded

    12 November 1903 CE – 20 August 1914 CE Rafael Merry del Val Spanish cardinal and diplomat. (1865–1930) Has references
  7. 13 October 1914 CE – 22 January 1922 CE Pietro Gasparri cardinal of the Catholic Church (1852–1934)
  8. 6 February 1922 CE – 7 February 1930 CE Pietro Gasparri cardinal of the Catholic Church (1852–1934)
  9. 7 February 1930 CE – 2 March 1939 CE Pius XII pope of the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958 Has references
  10. Gap about 22 years with no holder recorded

    12 August 1961 CE – 30 April 1969 CE Amleto Giovanni Cicognani Italian catholic cardinal (1883-1973)
  11. 2 May 1969 CE – 9 March 1979 CE Jean-Marie Villot Roman Catholic cardinal (1905–1979)
  12. 1 July 1979 CE – 1 December 1990 CE Agostino Casaroli Catholic cardinal (1914-1998)
  13. 29 June 1991 CE – 15 September 2006 CE Angelo Sodano cardinal of the Catholic Church
  14. 15 September 2006 CE – 15 October 2013 CE Tarcisio Bertone cardinal of the Catholic Church Has references

No dates recorded 7

Chronology is not a full explanation

Why one holder followed another takes evidence beyond the order of their dates.

Sources

Sources and evidence

Where every statement on this page comes from, and how each one stands.

0 statements on this record

This record makes no statements of its own yet, so there is nothing here to weigh.

Only this record’s own statements. What other records say about it is counted on theirs.

Three layers, three licences

Data
Wikidata · CC0 1.0
Text
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0, quoted, not merged

Review

Not yet read by an editor here. Every relationship on this page is an import.

Disagreements are kept, not resolved, and a count of sources is not a confidence score.

Arild Vågen · CC BY-SA 3.0

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