Jeanlouis Tauran

Personal

Vocation

French ecclesiastic, a Roman Catholic Cardinal named in June 2007 as the Vatican's new coordinator of interreligious dialogue effective 1 September 2007. Prior to that, he had spent 28 years at the Vatican as a diplomat including 13 of those years in Pope John Paul's foreign service. He was the Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church from 20 December 2014 until his death. Ordained a priest in 1969, he entered the Vatican's diplomatic service in 1975. From 1975 to 1983 he served in the Dominican Republic and Lebanon where he became familiar with Middle Eastern affairs. In 1983 he was assigned to work in the Vatican's Secretariat of State first as a representative to the Conference on Security and Cooperation until 1988. That year he was named undersecretary for relations with states and in 1990 he became secretary of the department. The following year, 1991, Pope John Paul II ordained him an archbishop and Tauran was elevated to cardinal in 2003. He died on 5 July 2018, aged 75, in Hartford, Connecticut. Link to Wikipedia biography