Last year, I spent about six months reporting a feature story and an accompanying podcast episode for America on how women are rising to leadership positions in the Vatican. It’s one of my favorite subjects: In 2019, when I traveled to Rome to report on the Vatican’s historic summit on preventing sexual abuse, I carved Read more
The founder and all-female editorial board of the Vatican’s women’s magazine Women Church World have resigned after what they say was a Vatican campaign to discredit them and put them “under the direct control of men.” In the final editorial and open letter to Pope Francis, released to news media ahead of the magazine’s 1 Read more
Lucetta Scaraffia, who edits the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano women’s supplement, has published an editorial defending the media’s role in unlocking the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Scaraffia says the “implacable and pitiless” nature of the coverage is “born from disappointment.” In her view, in societies affected by the sexual revolution, this disappointment Read more
A global network of Catholic women has called on male prelates to include more female experiences and voices in discussions at the synod on the family. A collection of 40 short essays by Catholic women, titled Catholic Women Speak: Bringing Our Gifts to the Table, is to be launched in Rome on October 1. Pope Read more
Sex-abuse and other scandals that trouble the Catholic Church could have been avoided if women had been in positions of power, according to the woman who edits a new supplement in the Vatican newspaper. Journalist-historian Lucetta Scaraffia is campaigning for women’s rights in the male-dominated Vatican and pushing for women to teach in seminaries to Read more