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Women and Church Governance: What Pope Francis’s Reform Changed—and What It Left Open
by Francisca Pérez-Madrid
Pope Francis once described clericalism as “one of the greatest deformations” in the life of the Catholic Church. It is a strong diagnosis. What is striking, then, is how resistant that clericalism has proven to reform—even after Praedicate Evangelium, the most ambitious overhaul of the Roman Curia in decades.
That apostolic constitution, promulgated in March 2022 after nine years of preparation, contains a genuinely historic statement: for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, any member of the faithful—including a laywoman—can in principle lead a dicastery of the Roman Curia. And Pope Francis did not merely open that door on paper. In January 2025, Sister Simona Brambilla became the first woman ever named prefect of a Vatican dicastery, and Sister Raffaella Petrini was appointed governor of Vatican City State. Under Pope Leo XIV, the momentum has continued: Sister Tiziana Merletti was named secretary of the same dicastery in May 2025, resulting in three of its top five positions held by women religious.
In Refah Partisi (the Welfare Party) and Others v. Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights sided with the Turkish Constitutional Court, which had ordered the dissolution of the party based on its being a threat to secular constitutional order. Brett G. Scharffs (International Center for Law and Religion Studies) explains why and how his and his students’ opinions about the Refah Partisi case have changed over the years and why he no longer considers the Court’s decision to be an overreaction.
On my office shelves is a copy of the Rodin sculpture La Cathédrale, depicting two hands. I often begin presentations by asking people in the audience to try to recreate the image. What usually happens is that people try to do this by themselves but quickly find they can’t. In fact, it can’t be recreated without somebody else because it depicts two right hands. To me, the sculpture is symbolic of interfaith engagement—of the need for different, distinct entities to create engagement and relationship. But the sculpture also represents the relationship and engagement between education and freedom of religion or belief: You can’t have freedom of religion or belief without education, and you shouldn’t have education without freedom of religion or belief (FoRB).
On 17 March 2026, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) issued a judgment regarding Catholic institutions in Germany and their employment relationships, in Katholische Schwangerschaftsberatung v. JB. The ruling established that a Catholic employer, in this case a pregnancy counseling office at Caritas, cannot terminate a contract of employment solely on the basis of the employee’s leaving the Catholic Church. The Court determined that such a dismissal constitutes unequal treatment, unless the employee’s church membership is a genuine, legitimate, and necessary requirement for the specific occupation. While acknowledging the right of churches to self-determination in employment matters, the CJEU determined the dismissal to be unlawful, as the employer did not generally require staff to be Catholic and had employed non-Catholics in similar roles.
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