UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
Patricia Miller
Pope Francis has promised to lift up women’s voices and create more meaningful roles for women in the church, but if the Vatican’s latest bumbling effort to do so is any indication, it might be better for the pope to just say something else cute about puppies or bunnies.
At its three-day annual meeting beginning today the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture will be discussing “Women’s Culture: Equality and Difference.” As the title suggests, the meeting is less an attempt to advance the status of women in the church by giving them access to any real authority—which would necessitate admitting women to the priesthood—and more an effort to burnish the church’s tarnished reputation with women while holding fast to its “complementarian” views.
The effort started off disastrously when the Vatican created a widely derided video featuring a sexy blonde Italian actress rather vampishly soliciting short videos from women to be part of a “great meeting of cardinals and bishops in Rome” to discuss their lives—without them.
While the Vatican notes that a panel of women had a hand in drafting the conference document, the actual discussions about the lives of women will be held by the all-male Pontifical Council for Culture, who will in all their manly wisdom ponder such questions as why “women had so little impact on the Church’s structures.”
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