Papal praise for women and their leadership
March 06, 2023
“The woman has the capacity to have three languages together: that of the mind, that of the heart, and that of the hands,” Pope Francis said on March 4, as he received members of the editorial staff of Donne Chiesa Mondo [Women Church World], the monthly supplement to the Vatican newspaper. “And she thinks what she feels, she feels what she thinks and does, she does what she feels and thinks.”
“I’m not saying all women do that, but they have that capacity, they have it,” the Pope added.
The papal audience took place as Donne Chiesa Mondo commemorates its tenth anniversary. For the last four years, the supplement’s editorial staff has been led by Rita Pinci; in 2019, the entire editorial staff, then led by Lucetta Scaraffia, resigned.
“Women have an ability to manage and think that is totally different from us and also, I would say, superior to us, in another way,” the Pontiff continued. “We see it in the Vatican too: where we have placed women, things change immediately, they go forward.”
Pope Francis also praised the examples of the mother of an Argentine trade union leader, as well as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
The former, said the Pope, was a poor maid who treated her drug addicted son with tenderness when he was a young adult; since then, “this man has become a great trade unionist.” The latter, said the Pope, calls her seven children every afternoon, and “managed to unblock that opposition of the European Union report to Europe during Covid” by “Benelux [Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg] and some other country that opposed it.”
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