In what’s likely to be seen as a classic example of the adage that “personnel is policy,” Pope Francis on Saturday tapped an Argentine archbishop widely seen as a close ally and ghostwriter for several major papal documents as the Vatican’s new doctrinal czar.
In a July 1 statement, the Vatican said the mandate of Spanish Jesuit Cardinal Luis Ladaria as head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and head of the International Theological Commission has come to an end.
The announcement said that Pope Francis has named Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández of La Plata, Argentina, to succeed Ladaria, formally taking over in mid-September.
A long-time protégé of Francis, Fernández is widely seen as one of the pontiff’s ghost-writers, including for major landmark texts such as his 2015 eco-encyclical Laudato Si’; his 2016 post-synodal exhortation on the family Amoris Laetitia; and his first-ever apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudim, published in 2013 and widely considered a tone-setting text for the rest of Francis’s papacy.
A priest at the time of Francis’s election, Fernández was appointed by the pope as rector of the Pontifical University of Argentina, and he was Francis’s first episcopal appointment.