Pietro Parente was a long-serving theologian in the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church, and was made a cardinal on 26 June 1967.
13 Facts About Pietro Parente
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Pietro 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.
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Pietro 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.
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Pietro Parente 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.
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Pietro Parente was the assessor of most of the cases done by the Holy Office during these years and knew Pope Pius XII personally.
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Pietro Parente was archbishop of Perugia from 1955 to 1959, when Pope John XXIII made him one of the highest-ranking officials of the Holy Office.
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When this was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965, Pietro Parente became secretary, but he was viewed by Paul VI as too outspoken in personality to be given the job of prefect - which was given to the lesser-known but friendly and tactful Yugoslav Franjo Seper.
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Pietro Parente was elevated to the cardinalate on 26 June 1967, ceasing thereupon to be Secretary of the Congregation, since that post, subordinate to that of Prefect, could not be held by a cardinal.
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Pietro Parente was originally highly dubious about the Vatican rehabilitating Galileo during the Vatican Council, but was less opposed to it by the time Pope 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.
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Pietro Parente's age disqualified him from participating in the papal conclaves of 1978.
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Pietro Parente, who is rumored to have assisted Pope Pius XII in preparing the encyclical Humani generis, wrote in Filosofia e teologia di Pio XII about the magisterium of Pius XII, which he characterized as firm without any bending of eternal truth in favour of popular beliefs in his days.
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Pietro Parente rejects theological relativism, which would reduce the Christian faith to grass, bent by the winds of time.
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Pietro Parente used the papacy not only to teach the truth but to bring together all Christians separated from the Holy Roman Catholic Church, but not by reducing basic the truth entrusted to the Church.