The Vatican View of Women

Tiring of Hallmark movies and horrible COVID-19 news, several days ago I tuned into my local PBS station where they were re-running a special called "Inside the Vatican". This episode concerned the preparations for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday within the Vatican.

They showed how the groundskeepers and maintenance men worked overtime to prep various venues for celebrations for these two pivotal events in the Catholic calendar. From dusting the tippy-top of the sculptures over the altar to sweeping Vatican Square for bombs. From grooming the shrubs which would be in front of His Holiness to testing the TV equipment which would carry the Pope's voice around the world. How the administrators oversaw those preparations. How various bishops and cardinals prepared themselves spiritually for the Great Day.

As I watched in fascination the extraordinary access the film makers were given, I was struck by a blaring (at least for me) hole in the personnel covered. Is their coverage "holy"? Or is their coverage exactly as the situation appears in the Vatican?

• No female journalists who cover the Vatican for global papers
• No female groundskeepers, whose job it was, among others, to cut branches for Palm Sunday
• No female choir singers (boys sang the soprano parts)
• No female administrators
• No female security personnel
• No statuary of female saints
• No female ambassadors from any nation

There was the brief scene of nuns, preparing meals for the poor and downtrodden. (Women's work, I guess.) There was a female assistant to the assistant ambassador, to be fair. And one solitary female translator. But zero female person in any role of import and zero female person in a role of consequence.

The retinue of inmates from a local prison who came to offer the Pope their feet to wash (a piece of theatre worthy of a PR person's wet dream) were all male. Even the clerical tailor shop is a run by guy. Wonder how many seamstresses he has in his employ?


One journalist who covers the Vatican said "Pope Francis isn't a liberal nor a conservative but a radical" and proceeded to tout all the "changes" the Pope has made to the way things are run in the Vatican.




Except the "changes" aren't really changes at all. He hasn't changed one damn thing, whether it is regarding the way child abuse charges are handled by the Vatican, nor by allowing women to follow their consciences when it comes to birth control or divorce, nor has anything changed in allowing women to serve as priests. And if women cannot become priests, they cannot climb the corporate ladder to become bishops or cardinals or even Pope.

So where is the so-called "radicalism" of the Pope? Status quo doesn't seem to me to be all that radical. Twenty-six hundred people work at the Vatican. Maybe 2% of those workers are female. "Radical"?

                                         
Until the Catholics (and other lesser-known Christian sects) change their views on women, they will continue to lose membership. Surely women have proven that they are as well prepared as men to take leadership roles and that they are worthy of more than being members of the altar society and embroidering vestments?

I guess Mary, a female saint who was privileged to carry the Christ Child, is so much chopped liver? Because even images of Mary were few and far between. This is the crux. Until the Church stops looking at women as wombs, capable of holding the Divine but not worthy of anything more important than their embroidery skills would dictate, religion will continue to decline. You cannot ignore 51% of the population.

I'm reminded of a sermon I heard way back when. "The Seven Last Words of the Church--'We never did it that way before.'"