A year ago, the news surprised the Catholic world: on January 6, 2025, Pope Francis appointed the first woman to head a Vatican dicastery. The Consolata missionary Simona Brambilla was named to oversee more than 600,000 religious sisters and brothers (including 128,559 priests) worldwide.
No less unprecedented was the appointment of a pro-prefect, a position not previously provided for by curial norms in this case. Cardinal Ángel Fernández Artime, SDB, assumed this role, whose performance remains opaque.
The major secular media outlets cheered the news: «opening» toward women, «pink revolution,» «female empowerment» in the Church. The clichés delighted Francis, who dreamed of «demasculinizing» the Church, although he had already commented, without fear of falling into inconsistency, that appointing a woman to a dicastery would be something merely «functional.»
The new prefect had illustrious predecessors, such as Cardinal José de Calasanz Félix Santiago Vives y Tutó, OFM Cap. (1908-1913), the Thomistic theologian and Mariologist Alexis-Henri-Marie Lépicier, OSM (1928-1935), and Teodoro Valfre di Bonzo (1920-1922), doctor in Theology and Canon Law.
What were Sister Simona Brambilla’s credentials?
Only one: being a woman.
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