Female prefects now govern religious orders and help choose bishops. Mallorca stages dance inside the Assumption liturgy while Belgium sends Rome a Pride-marching ambassador.
Vaticano in rosa. The Vatican turns pink.
Italian headline writers have been reaching for the phrase so often that it has become almost tedious. Still, they have seen something many Catholic commentators prefer to soften. A structural change is underway in Rome, and Leo has spent the first fifteen months of his reign making it durable.
On June 2, he named María Montserrat “Montse” Alvarado, the 39-year-old president of EWTN News, prefect of the Dicastery for Communication. She will become the first non-religious woman to lead a Vatican dicastery when she takes office on November 1. Four weeks later, Leo promoted Sister Alessandra Smerilli to prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. In February, he placed Sister Simona Brambilla on the Dicastery for Bishops and retained Sister Raffaella Petrini and María Lía Zervino there. Brambilla already heads the Dicastery for Consecrated Life, where another woman, Sister Tiziana Merletti, serves as secretary.
The names keep coming. Women have been appointed to the Council for the Economy, the Holy See’s human-resources directorate, the Vatican Library, the commission for sacred archaeology, the press office, social-policy dicasteries and pontifical academies. One could mistake the cumulative effect for a hiring drive.
It is more ambitious than that.
Francis created a legal route around the male priesthood. Leo is turning it into the ordinary architecture of Roman government.
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