Anthony Randazzo chosen by Pope Leo XIV for senior role in Roman Curia
Pope Leo appointed an Australian bishop to head the Vatican office that oversees the Catholic Church’s comprehensive legal system.
Anthony Randazzo, Bishop of Broken Bay on the NSW Central Coast, will be the first Australian to head a Vatican office since the late Cardinal George Pell.
Randazzo was elected Governor of the Dicastery of Legislative Texts on Wednesday. In this role, he will be the Vatican’s chief legal expert and will be responsible for interpreting and updating canon law.
The appointment is accompanied by the automatic bestowal of the title of archbishop, effectively promoting Randazzo from bishop to archbishop.
This position was previously held by Archbishop Filippo Iannone, who served as Governor from 2018-2025.
Who is Anthony Randazzo?
Anthony Randazzo was born in Sydney and spent most of his childhood in south-east Queensland.
He studied at Pius XII State Seminary in Brisbane and the University of Queensland and was ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Brisbane in 1991.
Before his appointment as bishop, Randazzo studied canon law at the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He later worked for five years in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Among other things, the office handles clergy sexual abuse cases around the world.
While working in the Congregation office, Randazzo grappled with the effects of the sexual abuse crisis in the church, including during the period when the Australian Royal Commission investigated decades of cases in which priests raped children and bishops covered it up.
He was officially appointed Bishop of Broken Bay in 2019.
Debates over women’s rank are distracting, says Randazzo of the real challenges faced by women around the world.
In a press conference in 2024, he said that Catholics were “obsessed” with the issue of women’s ordination, but that “women are completely ignored, treated as second-class citizens in many parts of the church and the world.”
Randazzo was also a vocal critic of the Bondi terror attack used social media channels to strongly condemn antisemitism following the attack.
“We must reject anti-Semitism completely. Violence corrodes the soul of a nation. When it is directed against a people because of who they are, what they believe or how they pray, it strikes at the foundations of our common life,” he said in the video he shared on Facebook.
What is the Roman Curia?
The Roman Curia is the central administrative body of the Vatican. It is carried out by the Secretariat of State under the chairmanship of a cardinal. The Secretariat is divided into three subdivisions: General Affairs, Relations with States, and the Diplomatic Staff of the Holy See.
The three subdivisions of the Secretariat include catastrophes, tribunals, and papal commissions.
The Dicastery of Legislative Texts (the body that Randazzo was preparing to lead) was first created by Pope Benedict XV in 1917. Founded by Benedict.
It advises the Pope, checks legal loopholes, ensures the proper legal application of Catholic doctrine, and coordinates with other offices in the Curia.
Pell served as Pope Francis’ chief financial advisor at the Curia from 2014 to 2019.
Randazzo will remain in Broken Bay for the next three months before moving to Rome to begin his new role.
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with AP
Emily Kaine is a national news blogger for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
