Pope Names ‘First Woman’ in the Senior Diplomatic Position for the Vatican Administration

It was for the first time in the history of the Vatican that a woman has been appointed to hold a high-ranking post in the Secretariat of State, which is the male-dominated Vatican’s diplomatic and administrative nerve centre, when Pope Francis named 66-year-old Francesca Di Giovanni for the Secretariat.

The laywoman from Italy, Francesca Di Giovanni, will now assume the role in the newly created post in a division known as the Section for Relations with States, where she will be placed in the rank of undersecretary, which is effectively one of two deputy foreign ministers.

The Vatican also confirmed Di Giovanni’s appointment in a statement saying she would oversee the multilateral relations in the Secretariat where she has worked since 1993. She is a specialist in human rights and international law.

In her reaction, Di Giovanni told the official Vatican website Vatican News, “her appointment was unprecedented though the responsibility is connected to the job, rather than to the fact of being a woman”.

She also added, “A woman may have certain aptitudes for finding commonalities, healing relationships with unity at heart. I hope that my being a woman might reflect itself positively in this task, even if they are gifts that I certainly find in my male colleagues as well.”

The Roman Catholic Church has a tradition to allow only men, who can be ordained as priests and women are traditionally been consigned to the shadows of its administration.

However, women groups such as the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), which is an umbrella group of the Catholic nuns, have long called on the pope to appoint more females to the senior jobs within the Vatican bureaucracy.

They have time and again cite figures showing that more than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics are women and that the membership of female religious orders is about three times larger than the male orders.

The Vatican is a sovereign state surrounded by Rome. Considered as the smallest country in the world, the Vatican has diplomatic relations with more than 180 countries. 

The pope has promised to appoint more women in the decision-making jobs in the Vatican. So far two most prominent women holding top positions are Barbara Jatta, who is heading the Vatican Museums and Cristiane Murray, who is the deputy head of the press office.

Pope Francis appointed four women as first female councilors for the Synod of Bishops last year. The Synod of Bishops is a department, which was founded 50 years back, prepares major meetings of world bishops held every few years on different subjects.