The Holy See has announced the transfer of Archbishop Andrzej Józwowicz, until now the apostolic nuncio in Iran, to the Nunciature in Sri Lanka, a destination that is significantly more relevant from a pastoral perspective. The appointment, published in the official bulletin of the Holy See, leaves the see of Tehran vacant, a historically marginal position in terms of the number of Catholic faithful but laden with singular symbolism in the curial memory, as it was the place to which one of the most controversial figures of the post-conciliar period was sent under circumstances never officially clarified.
Because before becoming the most famous nunciature of exile in contemporary Catholicism, Iran was simply Iran: a remote country, Muslim to the core, with a microscopic Catholic presence and practically null pastoral relevance. No one dreamed of Tehran; no one requested it; no one used it as a springboard. Until a proper name was forever welded to that destination: Annibale Bugnini.
Bugnini was not a gray bureaucrat or a recycled diplomat. He was, for years, the true chief engineer of the post-conciliar liturgical reform, the man who went from being a discreet Lazarist monk to a cardinal in the shadows, without a biretta but with a power that many cardinals with a ring on their finger never achieved. His obsession was the liturgy and his conviction, unshakeable, that the traditional liturgy should not be reformed, but surpassed. Not corrected, but dismantled and reassembled with new pieces, preferably unrecognizable.
From the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia, Bugnini operated with a mixture of ideological fervor and administrative cunning that today is almost admirable, if it were not for the fact that its consequences continue to be a source of dispute half a century later. He was the soul of the Novus Ordo Missae, the smiling face of the 1969 Missal, and the man who convinced half the Curia that the liturgical tradition could be treated as a provisional draft. Many later collaborators, such as Louis Bouyer, would end up acknowledging with belated frankness that the process was plagued with improvisations, manipulations of ancient texts, and a rupturist enthusiasm that bordered on doctrinally reckless.
As the new rite imposed itself, discomfort also grew. Not only among the faithful or priests, but in the Roman offices. Bugnini accumulated enemies, not so much for what he said as for the way he did it: excluding, marginalizing, cornering any objection under the infallible label of the “spirit of the Council”. And it was then that the famous rumors began to circulate. Masonry. Discreet affiliations. Dossiers. Whispers. Nothing conclusively proven, everything serious enough not to be ignored.
Paul VI, the pope tormented by post-conciliar tensions, opted for the cleanest and cruelest solution at the same time. In 1976, Bugnini was appointed pro-apostolic nuncio in Iran. Without explanations. Without clarifications. Without turning back. From architect of the universal liturgy to diplomatic representative in a country without Catholic liturgy to reform. An artificial position, tailor-made, to mask an exile that no one wanted to explain, but that everyone understood.
The irony is so perfect that it borders on the literary. The man who dreamed of a Mass “open to the world” ended his days in a closed Islamic theocracy, where Catholics were a statistical footnote. Bugnini accepted the post, moved to Tehran, and died there in 1982, far from Rome, far from the altar he had redesigned, far even from the controversy he himself had created. Neither rehabilitated nor condemned: simply set aside. As one sets aside an uncomfortable piece of furniture from the main room.
And with the Tehran position free again, it is hard not to think—always in the key of strict diplomatic fantasy—how well that destination would fit today with some very current names. A Persian retirement could suit Víctor Manuel Fernández admirably, far from creative prologues and explanatory interviews; it would not clash with José Cobo Cano either, who could practice in Tehran a radical pastoral of silence, without microphones or framework documents. One could even dream of a historically and symbolically perfect milestone: Simona Brambilla as the first «nuncia» apostolic in Iran, thus crowning a see that, since Bugnini, does not limit itself to representing the Holy See, but offers something much more valuable: distance, desert, and a healthy disconnection from the center.