Viewpoint: What the 'Women Church World' resignations really mean

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Rita Ferrone writes in an article titled 'Don't Blame the Patriarchy' in Commonweal magazine: I've never been much enamoured of the idea of a 'women's supplement' to L'Osservatore Romano - What does that say about the main publication? That it's a men's newspaper-and intends to stay that way?

In 2012, out of a desire to promote women, Pope Benedict XVI asked the newspaper's then-editor Giovanni Maria Vian to make room for Lucetta Scaraffia, a historian and self-identified feminist, to write about women's issues at L'Osservatore Romano. With Vian's blessing, she went on to develop the monthly supplement, Donne Chiesa Mondo (Women Church World), which is now distributed in Italian, Spanish, and French (with English online only) and has a print circulation of about 12,000....

The Donne Chiesa Mondo team became concerned when the new editor of L'Osservatore Romano attended one of their planning meetings. He did not attend any more - but did go on to publish some articles by other women journalists in his newspaper....

.... When the news broke of the resignation of the seven women from Donne Chiesa Mondo - heralded by an open letter to Pope Francis and an editorial in Donne Chiesa Mondo - the story was told by all the major news outlets, with the dark interpretation that the Catholic Church's sexism once again was at work in the incident.

To read on see: www.commonwealmagazine.org/dont-blame-patriarchy

(Thanks to Robert Mickens in Rome for flagging up this article through Twitter.)