Vatican Just Named Woman at High Ranking Position

This morning, Pope Francis of Vatican named the first woman to hold a high-ranking post in the Secretariat of State, the male-dominated Vatican’s diplomatic and administrative nerve centre, Reuters reported.

Italian lay woman Francesca Di Giovanni, 66, will assume a newly-created post in a pision known as the Section for Relations with States where she takes the rank of under-secretary, effectively one of two deputy foreign ministers.

Typically, only men are allowed by the Roman Catholic Church to be ordained as priests and women have been consigned to the shadows of its administration.

Over time, the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), an umbrella group of Catholic nuns, have long called on the Pope to appoint more females to senior jobs within the Vatican bureaucracy.

They referred to statistics showing that more than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics are women and that membership of female religious orders is about three times larger than male orders.

A Vatican statement said Di Giovanni will look after multilateral relations in the Secretariat where she has worked since 1993. Di Giovanni is a specialist in international law and human rights. The Vatican has diplomatic relations with more than 180 countries.

Last year, Francis also appointed four women as first female Councillors for the Synod of Bishops, a department founded more than 50 years ago that prepares major meetings of world bishops held every few years on a different topic.