Who is the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in Chile

The dean of the diplomatic corps accredited in Chile is Monsignor Kurian Mathew Vayalunkal, apostolic nuncio of the Holy See. He arrived in Santiago on 17 June 2025, three months after Pope Francis appointed him to the post on 15 March that year.

That the deanship falls to the Vatican’s representative is neither a local courtesy nor an improvised custom. The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which orders dealings between states, sets precedence by length of service in the post, but expressly preserves the practice of countries that grant precedence to the representative of the Holy See. Chile is one of them, and so the nuncio heads the corps whatever the date on which he presented his credentials.

What a dean does

The post commands no one. No ambassador answers to the dean: each answers to their own state. What the dean holds is the floor.

It is the dean who speaks on behalf of the 72 foreign missions when the corps addresses the receiving state as a body, beginning with the annual formal greeting to the President of the Republic. He is also the natural counterpart for the Foreign Ministry when a matter affects the whole corps rather than one embassy: from a change in the regime of immunities to the organisation of a collective ceremony.

In practice the deanship works as a rotating spokesmanship with fixed rules of succession. Nobody competes for it and nobody campaigns: it comes with seniority, or in the Chilean case, with the seat custom reserves for the Holy See.

Who Vayalunkal is

He was born on 4 August 1966 in Vadavathoor, in the Indian state of Kerala, and was ordained a priest on 26 December 1991. He holds a doctorate in canon law and speaks five languages: French, English, Italian, Spanish and German.

His diplomatic career took him first to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and from the start of 2021 he served as nuncio in Algeria and Tunisia, two postings where the Catholic Church is a small minority and the Vatican mission is above all a channel to Muslim states. Chile, with its long tradition of ties to the Holy See, is a posting of a different nature.

Source: ACI Prensa, Chilean Bishops’ Conference.