Pope Benedict Putting More Women in Top Jobs at Vatican

Via the Guardian:

"Pope Benedict is working on a plan to put more women in top jobs at the Vatican, his spokesman has disclosed.

Briefing journalists after visiting the Pope at his holiday retreat in the Alps, the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said the pontiff would give women "more space and more importance". At a debate late on Wednesday, the cardinal, who runs the Vatican bureaucracy, said changes would be introduced in an expected reshuffle of senior posts.

"We're drawing up the new appointments in the Vatican - everyone knows that - and in the context of the responsibilities of the women, there'll be posts that they take up", he said.

The top priority of Benedict's papacy is to tackle what Catholic leaders see as rampant secularisation in Europe. A key reason for this, in the view of many Vatican officials, is the disaffection of women who once formed the backbone of Catholic congregations."

Rocco over at Whispers has written about this last March: "that Benedict is intent to keep making good on his much burnished record of giving women the most collaborative place possible at the table of ecclesiastical administration.”

As I have noted before on ID, the issue at stake is governance and the laity, not just women.

Since I can never think in tidy politically correct categories, I have often been struck by the fact that the acrimonious debate over the ordination of women and feminism in general in the west has obscured and distorted several other critical discussions.

Like the fact that the debate over governance is not first and foremost a male-female issue. It is a ordained/non-ordained issue. And male cleric and non-ordained woman are not the only two categories at issue here. What about lay men?

Of the approximately 500 million Catholic men in the world, only 441,669 are ordained bishop, priests, or deacon. That's .0008833 %, folks. Only 9/100th of 1 % of all Catholic men are ordained. Yes, we ordain men but it doesn't therefore follow that the charisms, leadership and creativity of men, as a whole, have been honored and welcomed. (Of course, that also imply that simply changing the gender make-up of this tiny ordained minority would not mean that the charisms, leadership and creativity of women, as a whole, would have been honored and welcomed either.)

It has been my experience that the role of lay men is the least honored and appreciated one in the western Church today. The debate over feminism have made most western Catholics eager not to seem to be sexist. (This is clearly less true in cultures where women are regarded as inferior). In the west, because the image of the male cleric looms so large, there isn't a lot of room for another kind of strongly Catholic male image.

The debate over governance and leadership in the Church is not just, as it is so often portrayed, a battle of the sexes. It is most profoundly, a opportunity to consider the implications of the Church's teaching on the apostolic anointing of all the baptized (female and male), the insistence that the Church's primary identity is that of mission outward, and the integration of the “co-essential” (as Pope John Paul II put it) charismatic and institutional dimensions of the Church.

As we become clearer about the mission and role of the laity, it sheds new light on the ordained priesthood, whose entire purpose for existence is the fruition of the baptismal priesthood, and the larger issue of leadership as well. If Church’s primary mission is truly outward, not inward, that has huge implications for all forms of leadership, ordained or lay.

A CNS story from last March (which no longer has a working link) acknowledged the larger issue of the role of the laity with these final paragraphs:

"Some sources noted that while attention is often given to the men-women ratio at the Vatican another slow but significant shift has occurred in the number of lay employees in the Curia.

Laypeople now represent about 38 percent of employees in major curial agencies, numbering close to 300 people. Fifty years ago, half of the 12 Vatican congregations had no laypeople on their staffs; among the handful of laity who did work there at the time, none were women."