Pope Francis named U.S. Archbishop Michael W. Banach, a Vatican diplomat, to be apostolic nuncio to Cape Verde. The pope also named Italian Archbishop Franco Coppola to be the new nuncio to Mexico.
The Vatican made the announcements July 9.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Archbishop Banach, 53, will continue to serve as apostolic nuncio to Senegal and apostolic delegate to Mauritania.
Archbishop Coppola, 59, had been serving as nuncio to Burundi followed by Central African Republic and Chad. He fills a post left vacant by French Archbishop Christophe Pierre, who was named nuncio to the United States in April.
In other appointments announced the same day, Pope Francis named Gregory M. Reichberg, an expert in the relationship between war, religion and ethics, to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Reichberg, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, had been a professor of philosophy at Fordham University and The Catholic University of America.
The pope also named to the papal academy Ana Marta Gonzalez, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Navarra, Spain. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University studying morality, nature and culture in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
