Pope Benedict XVI carried out a long-awaited reshuffle of his top team at the Vatican today, naming Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa, as Secretary of State — in effect, the Pope’s deputy.

Cardinal Bertone, 71, led the Vatican campaign last year against Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, saying that it propagated "a sackful of heretical lies" about the history of Christianity and would mislead the gullible.

His campaign was taken up recently by other senior cardinals when the film of the book was released, despite the risk that this would only give The Da Vinci Code more publicity.

The reshuffle had been expected for weeks, but was reportedly held up because of behind-the-scenes doubts among some Vatican liberals over Cardinal Bertone’s reputation as a doctrinal hardliner.

The cardinal will take over from Cardinal Angelo Sodano in September. By coincidence both men are from the northern Italian region of Piedmont. The Secretary of State is the Vatican’s prime minister and also oversees its diplomatic relations.

Before going to Genoa, Cardinal Bertone was for seven years second in command to the current Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor to the Inquisition, which enforces doctrinal orthodoxy and excommunicates dissident Catholics.

Critics said that putting a Ratzinger-Bertone alliance at the top of the Vatican hierarchy meant that the Church would be in the hands of "arch-conservatives" at a time when many Catholics, especially in the Third World, are calling for reform.

However, since succeeding John Paul II in April last year the Pope has confounded caricatures of him as an unbending hardliner, reaching out to other religions and holding talks with liberals such as Hans Kung, the Swiss dissident theologian, whom the Pope himself had once banned from teaching theology.

Equally Cardinal Bertone, who became Archbishop of Genoa in 2002 and was made cardinal a year later, has forged a reputation as a genial and approachable churchman alert to modern social problems. He is described as a "rigorous but sensitive" theologian.

He is an ardent fan of Juventus football team, and has even acted as commentator on football matches for Genoese television stations. He once observed that although the Vatican opposed human cloning, "an exception might be made in the case of Sophia Loren".

Cardinal Sodano, 78, who had held the post of Secretary of State for 15 years, was already three years past the normal Vatican retirement age when Pope Benedict was elected, 14 months ago. However, the Pope asked him to remain in office to ensure continuity.

The Vatican announced that Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the American governor of Vatican City, would also retire in September and be replaced by Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, at present the Vatican’s foreign minister.

Last month the Pope named Cardinal Ivan Dias of Bombay as head of the Congregation for Evangelisation, the first Asian to head a top Vatican department, replacing Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe.

Cardinal Sepe in turn replaced Cardinal Michele Giordano as Archbishop of Naples, who had reached the retirement age of 75.

The transfer closed an unhappy chapter in the Naples archdiocese after allegations that Cardinal Giordano had been involved in a money-lending operation run by his brother. He was charged in 1999 and cleared, but later given a separate 4½-month prison sentence for illegally dividing up a church property into flats. He is appealing against the verdict.

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