This Pope has done more for women in the Vatican than any other Pope, says women's author

Francis has done more for women working in the Vatican than any other Pope, according to an Austrian author and journalist who works for Vatican Radio.

“There is a fresh wind blowing in the Vatican as far as women’s concerns are concerned. The Francis effect can be clearly felt”, Austrian journalist Gudrun Sailer, who has been working for the German section of Vatican Radio since 2003, told the Association of Catholic Publicists in Austria on a visit to Vienna.

Women’s role in the Church was one of the many “construction sites” that Francis had opened up in the Vatican and even if he would not be able to give any concrete answers, he had already “done more than any other Pope” as far as women in the Vatican were concerned, she told the audience. One of this Pope’s defining features was to impress on the Church to continue to forge ahead “rather than aim at a final clarification”, she added.

At the moment about 750 women worked in the Vatican which meant that roughly one fifth of Vatican employees were women.

“And they are not doing the cleaning jobs – those are done by men. Most of the women are academics”, she emphasised.

There was a particularly high percentage of women in the Curia where they worked as archivist, art historians, office heads and journalists.

The number of women in leading positions was on the increase. The film archive, the maintenance department of St Peter’s Basilica and the German edition of L’Osservatore Romano were all headed by women, for exmaple, she pointed out.

While the Pontifical Council for Culture was a “place where one feels heard as a woman”, there were only male employees at the Media Secretariat, which was “incomprehensible” in Sailer’s opinion.

Sailer has published several books on women in the Vatican in German. The best-known is Monsignorina, a biography published in 2014 of Hermine Speier (1898-1989), a German-Jewish archaeologist who was one of the first women to be employed at the Vatican when Pope Pius XII charged her to help organise the Vatican Museums.