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This Last March, a small Catholic magazine called Women's World Church In an article entitled "The (almost) free work of the sisters". Journalist Marie-Lucile Kubacki described nuns who, among other things, served meals to bishops, then ate in the kitchen, and were paid little or no money. nothing for the work that they do. This institutional sexism in the Catholic Church was not a shock, but the messenger was a surprise: Women's World Church is published by the Vatican. The Associated Press published an article on the talk, which was then covered by the Time, PBS and other outlets. A.P. and Time Both of them illustrate their work with portraits of the magazine's founder and editor, Lucetta Scaraffia, a seventy-year-old professor of history, wearing short, blond hair cut short, like a monk with a chic hairdresser, and who defines herself as a feminist
Scaraffia lives in Rome, but she spends her summers in Todi, about an hour's drive from the birthplace of St. Francis. In June, I went to see her there. Scaraffia founded Women's World Church in 2012. The magazine circulates once a month with L'Osservatore Romano, a daily newspaper created more than one hundred and fifty years ago and endowed with a kind of fuzzy editorial independence compared to church leaders. There are limits to what Women's World Church I can also publish, Scaraffia told me, sitting in the living room of her summer house, adorned with old advertisements of Napoleon, who kept Pope Pius VII in prison for several years.
Scaraffia does not see the Pope regularly, but he has his cell phone number. Once, he called, she said, to say that he loved one of his books that criticized the church for not listening to women. Scaraffia is conservative enough: she does not want women to be priests, nor does the pope overthrow the Church's position on sexual mores, she told me. But she thinks that abortion should be legal and she believes in a merciful Church, with doctrinal walls sufficiently porous to accommodate believers who do not conform to teachings about sex and romantic love.
She also believes that Catholic women can and should play a greater role in Church decisions. They must take "concrete policy measures," she said, and ask "what we can actually get." The Vatican is a windless society. State faithful to a heavy legacy bequeathed by the gospels, but Scaraffia is attentive to all the winds. The magazine's account of the nuns was inspired in part by the comments Francis made to a group of sisters two years ago. He said that he was disturbed to see them assign "a work of servitude and not of service". "So we wrote the article," Scaraffia said. After she was published, she heard some sisters who were relieved to see the Church recognizing that women's submission was a violation of divine prescription. ("The priests did not say anything," she says.)
Recognition, of course, is not the same thing as change. Last summer, new revelations were revealed that clerics allegedly assaulted and raped thousands of children from Germany to Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, cardinals from four continents were summoned to respond to the Pope or the courts for mistreating minors or protecting those who did. An archbishop accused Pope Francis of being made aware of the charges of sexual abuse against Theodore E. McCarrick and of having brought him up anyway. (McCarrick resigned from his position as Archbishop of Washington in July.) The revelations sparked new calls for women to gain greater authority in the church: perhaps if women occupied more positions of responsibility, these men could not have acted with impunity for so long.
A few days after our first meeting, I met Scaraffia for dinner under her porch, as well as her husband, who is also a historian and translator. The lights of the medieval castles of the region, both authentic and false, shone in the evening. At one point in our conversation, around pasta and a plate of mozzarella, Scaraffia said, "I would like women to become cardinal." After the comment was relayed in English, j I paused. A woman who does not think women should be priests or contraceptive pills, believes that women should be cardinal and occupy the rank just under the pope, which cardinals elect and advise?
Yes, said Scaraffia. It is true that the Vatican prohibits women from being ordained in the hierarchy of manners – even though nuns make vows, they are not ordained and are therefore laymen, not religious. Priests, who consecrate the host to Mass, must be ordained for this purpose, but Catholic theology does not require the cardinals to be ordained. Thus, theologically, lay people, including laymen, can be cardinals. Pope Francis "would have everyone against him" if he named a cardinal wife, Scaraffia said. "Everybody." She laughs. "He could do it just before he dies or give up his papacy," she continued. But "he could do it," she added. "He could."
Growing up in Turin, Scaraffia attended Mass with her mother, who took it less out of piety than for the sake of her daughter's welfare, Scaraffia told me. His mother was beautiful, she said. "It has become a weakness for her, not a strength. Working outside the house was a nightmare for her. She married at age twenty and resigned to a quiet life. Scaraffia would eventually feel that her work, as a feminist then a Catholic, was partly to "save other women what my mother had endured".
Scaraffia stopped going to Mass during her first year at the university. She married at age twenty-three and divorced two years later. In studying the history of women, she met a teacher separated from his wife; they had a daughter together but never got married. When they separated, six years later, Scaraffia became a single mother. She taught at Sapienza University in Rome and lived behind St. Mary's Basilica in Rome, Trastevere. One day, at the end of her thirties, she saw devotees wearing an icon of the Virgin in the church. She was struck, she said, by "a very powerful physical feeling of fear". She went back to Mass.
She started contributing to L'Osservatore Romano in 2007, after Pope Benedict XVI had asked his editor, the philologist Giovanni Maria Vian, to give more space to women in the newspaper, which had no female journalist. "I would not dare to call myself a feminist," said Vian, but in the church, there must be more space for women. When Scaraffia asked Vian to create her own women's magazine, he sent the request to Benedict, who agreed. (Scaraffia sees Benedict, who is now the first pope emeritus, rarely, but more often than she does see Francis, she said. "As a woman, you really have the chance to see him." impression of treating you as a colleague, "she said of the former pontiff.)
After meeting Scaraffia, I went to a gathering of Catholic women organized in Rome by Paola Lazzarini, a sociologist based in Sardinia, who described Scaraffia as "a point of reference for us all". Lazzarini, with about thirty co-authors of a document entitled "Manifesto of Women for the Church". (The authors initially connected to Facebook.) She sent it by email to Scaraffia, who published it in the March issue of Women's World Church, in front of the report on the servitude of the nuns. Lazzarini has since started to organize public forums all over Italy. She hoped that women, especially in more socially conservative areas like Calabria, where she had hosted the first meeting, would become "aware of their situation in the Church".
This particular gathering took place in a parish hall behind Santa Maria Basilica, the church where Scaraffia had returned to Catholicism three decades earlier. A dozen women and a few men gathered in a semi-circle. A woman in her fifties told the group that she had taught religion in a school until her divorce, after which the local bishop ordered her to dismiss her. One teacher explained to the group how frustrating it is that Catholic parishes do not seem to know what to do with women who are not nice.
Lazzarini and I had coffee the next morning. A former nun, she is now married and has a girl. She was wearing pearls and her hair was floating. She left her congregation after five years, she said, frustrated by the frequency with which women were underestimated by male leaders of the Church. While patriarchal attitudes persist in the secular world, women's obedience "is presented as if it were the will of God," she added. But what would happen if women felt "strong enough to give the Church what they know? "What can they do? And not to submit to please men? She finished her espresso, then added, "It is our turn to speak not only for ourselves but for the Church. "
Two years ago, Pope Francis convened a commission to study the possibility of having a woman deacon. A deacon can perform many tasks of a priest, including baptisms, but can not devote the host. In October, Women's World Church published an editorial by the editor of the famous Jesuit magazine America, reporting that a majority of Catholic women in the United States want the Church to ordain female deacons. But Scaraffia told me that she believed that Francis would not accept women deacons – that he did not want women to be ordained as nuns of any rank. (This summer, not for the first time, Francis explicitly excluded the possibility of female priests: only men can be priests, according to the Holy See, because Jesus chose only men as apostles.) Other Catholic activists are more optimistic. Kate McElwee, Executive Director of the Conference on the Ordination of Women, told me she found Pope Francis's "openness to dialogue" encouraging. "We know that there are women who are called by God," she said.
In any case, the cardinals do not need to be called by God, but only by man. "Cardinals are an invention of the Church, to govern themselves," said Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology in Villanova. In the first millennium, the title was honorific for respected men, with no specific duties or power. In 1059, the Church granted the cardinals the exclusive right to elect the pontiff. Fourteen years later, Pope Gregory VII began to reduce the number of lay people in favor of clerics. (The idea was to eliminate corruption by replacing ethically suspicious laypeople with holy, good and loyal men.)
Yet there was no ban, terrestrial or empyrean, on the laity entering the ranks, and here and there they did it. But after the complete conquest of the Italian kingdom by the Papal States in the nineteenth century, the Church became "more sacerdotal, "as Faggioli says. The cardinals having lost much of their temporal power, they were less and less regarded as secular diplomats and more as religious men. Pope Pius IX chose the last unordered cardinal in 1858, an Italian lawyer named Teodolfo Mertel. In 1917, the Holy See modified the canon law by limiting the cardinalate to the orderly. (In the eighties, the law was updated to limit nominations to bishops only.) However, canon law is not a gospel. If the pope wants to change it, Faggioli said: "He can do it with a pen stroke."
Scaraffia says that the Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas gave her the idea that women could become cardinals. The Spanish newspaper El País revived the notion shortly after the election of Francis, speculating that the new pontiff could include the name of a woman in his first selections for the College of Cardinals. Francis's spokesman at the time, Federico Lombardi, told reporters that it was "not entirely realistic". But he conceded: "theologically and theoretically, it is possible". Francis is the first Jesuit Pope and the first Latin American Pope; he alarmed conservative clerics by suggesting that divorced women and women who had an abortion could be welcomed to take communion.
Yet women still do not occupy any of the highest or second most important positions of the Vatican Government, the Roman Curia. Pope Francis "is not a feminist," Scaraffia told me in June. But he is, she believes, a "good politician", an adaptive realist who can see that the Church, in its present form, disappoints and hurts many of its members. In September, the Council of Cardinals Councilors Francis issued a statement in which he announced that he would ask the pope to evaluate "the work, structure and composition of the council itself". Like Chantal Götz, executive director of Voices of Faith, another women's rights group When I asked her about Scaraffia's suggestion, "what a symbolic gesture it would be if the pope named women with cardinal clefts emptied by the cardinals involved in the concealment of sexual abuse, "he told me.
In August, I wrote to Pope Francis' spokesperson, Greg Burke, asking if his boss would appoint a woman to the rank of cardinal. "It's an interesting debate," replied Burke. "But the pope will not name cardinal women." I sent an email to Scaraffia to share her answer. Was the answer of Pope Francis definitive in his eyes? And what did she do with the religious debacle of the summer? She did not consider Burke's answer definitive and her two questions, she added, are related. "I think we are going through a serious and profound crisis in the Church," she wrote, adding that this would bring about real change. Perhaps, she continued, such a change could include, "who knows, maybe even cardinal women!"
On October 3, Pope Francis delivered a homily at the opening of the Synod of Bishops, a one-month conference on Church issues. (This was about the Church's relationship with its younger members.) "A church that does not listen. . . can not be credible, "he told the assembled clerics, including fifty cardinals. At the synod, participants vote on proposals for Pope Francis; this time, the Vatican invited a few dozen women, but they do not have the right to vote. Eleven lobby groups, including the Lazzarini organization, have created a petition insisting that women vote at the synod. This petition was handed over to his office with more than nine thousand signatures. The rules have not been changed. On Saturday, the synod adopted a sixty-page final document stressing "the absence of women's voices and views" and recommending "to increase the awareness of everyone of the urgency of inevitable change".
In the meantime, the latest issue of Women's World Church includes an article under the signature of Scaraffia. Some believe that a "good" pope "will end up" opening the doors to women, "appointing them to positions of responsibility in church government," she writes. she, the women can not wait for this pope.Women, too, were complicit in the crisis of sexual abuse perpetrated by the church: they played the role of "obedient girls" and served the clerics who protected each other "The condition of women in the Church will only change if women have the courage to begin to change it from below." Two days before the beginning of the Synod of Bishops, a symposium organized by the Catholic Women Speak group was held in Rome, where Scaraffia was even more explicit: "Why do not we become a nuisance wherever women are not present? "She said," I am waging a war against the patriarchate of the Church. "
The search for this article was made possible thanks to the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America. Giulia Alagna has translated the translation.
