Despite Francis’ numerous statements about women’s skills and the need to participate in decision-making, there are almost no Catholics in senior positions in the administration.
Pope Francis has appointed Sister Alessandra Smerili as interim secretary of the Dicastery for the Promotion of All Human Development and as a delegate to the Vatican Commission for COVID-19, the DPA reported, citing the Holy See.
The Vatican News portal said Smerili was the first woman to be appointed secretary of the dicastery, a department of the Vatican administration.
Monsignor Bruno Marie Duff and Father Augusto Zampini replaced Smerli.
From March 2021, Smerili was Assistant Secretary of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Overall Human Development.
The Catholic Church and women
In January 2020, the agencies broke the news that Pope Francis had appointed the first woman to hold a senior position in the Secretariat of State, a male-dominated diplomatic and administrative center of the Vatican.
Layer Francesca Di Giovanni, 66, will take up the newly created position in a department known as the Section for State Relations, where she holds the rank of deputy secretary, effectively one of the two deputy foreign ministers, the agencies said at the time.
The Roman Catholic Church allows only men to be ordained, as priests and women have traditionally been sent into the shadows of its administration, he noted. NBC. However, women’s rights organizations, including those that support Catholic nuns, have long called on the pope to appoint more women to senior positions in the Vatican bureaucracy.
In his New Year’s sermon in early 2020, Francis said that women “should be fully involved in the decision-making process” in the church.
Many popes have spoken out loud about Catholic women, but by repeatedly speaking emotionally about the church’s need for them, Francis has raised expectations that women will actually be given power. However, six years after his rule, he did not live up to our expectations, commented Celia Vigo Wexler on January 22, 2020 in NBC.
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