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# To the Pope's ruling that any baptised lay Catholic, women included, may head the departments of the Vatican: the new apostolic constitution has a preamble stating that the Pope, bishops and other ordained…
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/k-postanovleniiu-papy-rimskogo-chto-liuboi-kreshchenyi-katolik-mirianin-vkliuchaia-zhenshchin-mozhet-vozglavliat-departamenty-vatikana-v-novoi-apostolskoi-konstitutsii-est-preambula-kot/
- Published: 2022-03-20T10:17:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:39:13.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Observations, Society

This truly overturns the millennial foundations of the Catholic Church. The new constitution maintains that the presence of lay Catholics in leading roles in the Curia is necessary because of their familiarity with family life and social reality. As though priests lived in some other reality; and if they do, are they really so insensible and hard-hearted that the worldly reality remains beyond their grasp?

Was Francis's decision a surprise? Hardly. The first woman to hold a high-ranking post in the Vatican's Secretariat of State was an Italian laywoman, Francesca Di Giovanni, a lawyer who had handled the Vatican's external relations since 1993 and in 2020 became Undersecretary of the Section for Relations with States of the Secretariat of State.

Yet as early as 2018 a woman was presented for the post of head of the Vatican's economic department. Last year a woman for the first time took the post of Secretary General of the Governorate of Vatican City. Thus the Italian nun Raffaella Petrini became the highest-ranking woman in the papal state. In 2019 the Italian nun and professor of political economy at the Pontifical Faculty of Educational Sciences, Alessandra Smerilli, took the interim post of secretary of the Vatican's development department, which deals with questions of justice and peace. At the same time the Frenchwoman Nathalie Becquart became Undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, the department that prepares the assemblies of the world's bishops held every few years. Six women were included in the Council for the Economy, which oversees the use of the Vatican's resources.

At present the apostolic constitution carries an amendment to the effect that not simply "any member of the faithful may head a department or body of the Curia", but only if the Pope decides that the person possesses sufficient qualifications. Then again, who knows, this caveat may cease to matter in the near future. Experts already say that the department responsible for religious order, the department for consecrated life, might be headed by a nun, although for the time being it is headed by a cardinal.

Should anyone take me for a critic of the advancement of women in the Vatican's structures, I would observe that the changes now under way are rather decorative and opportunistic in character, and are meant to present Francis as progressive. Such winds have blown through the Church every time attention needed to be diverted from something unpleasant. And since 2020 there has definitely been a good deal less good news. More likely, all these appointments of women are steps aimed at impressing the public, and merely postpone the resolution of questions that truly matter to nearly a billion Catholic women and that concern the subject of reproductive dictate and restrictions on contraception.

Where were women invited first of all? To the most decrepit and scandal-ridden body of all, the Finance Office of the Roman Catholic Church, where order had long been overdue in any case. If something goes wrong, nobody will be surprised; but even without the new appointments, all administrative resources would have been directed towards stabilising activity in precisely this area. Not only here but in other departments too, women will be unable to take decisions without the deciding votes of men, and belong rather to consultative structures.