Indian Cardinal Ivan Dias

Indian Cardinal Ivan Dias, a longtime diplomat who was fluent in 17 languages, died June 19 in Rome. He was 81.

Cardinal Dias served as prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples before his retirement in 2011 and served as archbishop of Mumbai from 1996 to 2006.

His faith and 39 years in the Vatican’s diplomatic service, he said, taught him to avoid confrontation and solve problems through dialogue and fostering goodwill.

Pope Francis called the cardinal a “wise and gentle pastor” who served the Church and Vatican faithfully.

Born in Bandra, a Catholic stronghold in the western Indian city of Mumbai, then Bombay, he was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Mumbai in 1958 and received a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome.

In 1964, he completed his studies at the Vatican institute for diplomats and was appointed to the Vatican Secretariat of State.

He worked for the secretariat’s Eastern Europe desk for nine years, at the height of the Cold War, and became acquainted with St. John Paul II, the then-archbishop of Krakow, Poland.

He was chief of the desk that served several former Soviet republics, as well as West African countries and China, and he served at nunciatures in Scandinavia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Mauritius.

In 1982, he was consecrated archbishop and sent as apostolic nuncio to Ghana, Togo and Benin. In 1987, he was appointed apostolic nuncio to South Korea, where he worked for four years.

In 1991, he was appointed apostolic nuncio to post-communist Albania, where his task was to rebuild the Church after decades of harshly imposed official atheism.

St. John Paul made him a cardinal in 2001 and retired Pope Benedict XVI named him prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples in 2006, at a time when the Church’s missionary focus was making a sharper shift to the East.

He also helped in the Church’s outreach and support of Catholics, especially clergy, in China.

—CNS