To prepare for a diplomatic career, he entered the
Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in 1980. He joined the diplomatic service of the Holy See on 1 May 1984. On 5 February 2002, he was also appointed Apostolic Nuncio to Cape Verde and Mali. On 5 March he was appointed Nuncio to Guinea-Bissau.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Apostolic Nuncio to Chile on 6 December 2007. On 10 May 2011, he was appointed
Apostolic Nuncio to the Philippines. On 1 July 2017,
Pope Francis appointed him as
Apostolic Nuncio to Croatia. In 2018, a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Santiago made public an email message written to Pinto in 2009 by Archbishop
Francisco Javier Errázuriz, in which Errázuriz admitted to Pinto that had not followed the proper procedures for handling allegations of sexual abuse against
Fernando Karadima, a priest at the centre of the sex abuse crisis in Chile. He was replaced in Croatia in 2019, and Pope Francis accepted his resignation as nuncio on 31 July 2020. ==See also==