Cardinal Agostino Cacciavillan, a Vatican diplomat and former apostolic nuncio to the United States, has passed away at the age of 95.
Cacciavillan was the president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) before his retirement in 2002 after decades of diplomatic service in the Philippines, Kenya, India, and the US.
Pope Francis is expected to attend Cacciavillan’s funeral, which will be held in St. Peter’s Basilica on the morning of 7 March.
He was born in 1926, in the northern Italian city of Vicenza, Cacciavillan. Grew up in a large Italian family with eight brothers and sisters.
Following the end of World War II, he was ordained a priest in 1949 at the age of 22. He was trained at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy (1957-1959) in Rome before he was sent to the Philippines to serve as secretary in the apostolic nunciature in Manila.
Paul VI made Cacciavillan a titular archbishop and appointed him to be the apostolic pro-nuncio to Kenya in 1976. He spent five years in Kenya until John Paul II named him apostolic pro-nuncio to India in 1981 and the first apostolic pro-nuncio to the Kingdom of Nepal in 1985.
John Paul II appointed Cacciavillan as the apostolic nuncio to the US in 1990. The prelate remained in the Washington, DC post until 1998 when the pope called him back to Rome to manage Vatican finances.
Cacciavillan was mentioned more than 80 times in the McCarrick report prepared by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See in November 2020