Cardinal Casaroli Retires as Papal Foreign Policy Chief : Vatican: He was credited with strategy of low-profile maneuvering to keep the Catholic Church alive in the East during the Cold War.

In a major changing of the guard at the Vatican, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, a patient and polyglot prelate who became one of the world’s most traveled diplomats, retired Saturday as secretary of state.

Pope John Paul II immediately named another Italian, Archbishop Angelo Sodano, who had been Casaroli’s deputy, as his successor, thereby assuring continuity of Vatican foreign policy and preserving geopolitical balance in the Curia.

A Spanish cardinal and a French cardinal had been mentioned as candidates for secretary of state, the senior post in the Vatican hierarchy.

Casaroli, 76, is hailed at the Vatican as architect of the low-profile but relentless policy of backstage maneuvering that kept the Roman Catholic Church alive in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the anti-religion period at the height of the Cold War.

A tailor’s son from Piacenza near Milan who was told as a young priest that his supposedly delicate health would not allow him to travel abroad, Casaroli nevertheless enjoyed a distinguished career as a diplomat, traveling widely through the Communist capitals of Eastern Europe in the 1960s as envoy of Pope Paul VI.

For the last 11 years, Casaroli, a short, bespectacled man with an elfin grin, has been John Paul’s chief of staff and spry fellow traveler on trips around the world. By tradition, the papal secretary of state is always a diplomat. But he is also, in effect, the prime minister of the Vatican directly under the Pope and administers the church in the interregnum between popes.

In 1975, Casaroli was instrumental in getting strong articles on human rights and religious freedom included in the Helsinki Accords eventually accepted by the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies. Last month in Paris, again representing the Vatican, Casaroli was the only one of the 35 original Helsinki signatories to initial the follow-up document that wrote a formal end to the Cold War.

In May, 1979, by then already a Curia insider, Casaroli became John Paul’s choice as secretary of state, seven months after his own election. Last year, Casaroli submitted his resignation at the mandatory retirement age of 75. The Pope asked him to stay on.

In the astonishing interim, Catholicism has mushroomed in one Eastern European country after another in the wake of communism’s collapse. Casaroli, who spent years intriguing to keep churches open and priests out of jail behind the Iron Curtain, was on hand to welcome Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev when he came to call on a Polish Pope.

Sodano, the new secretary of state, is a 63-year-old native of the Piedmont region near Turin in northern Italy. He returned to the Vatican in 1988 to become director of foreign affairs in the secretariat of state after a long career in Europe and Latin America, climaxed by nearly a decade as papal nuncio in Chile, where the church became an outspoken opponent of dictator Augusto Pinochet.