Founder of Vatican Women’s Magazine Quits over Return to ‘Male Control’

The founder of Vatican’s first news insert on women’s issues has quit along with her all-female editorial staff, citing a return of the magazine to “the direct control of men.”

Lucetta Scaraffia, who founded and ran the monthly magazine Donne Chiesa Mondo (Women Church World), an insert in the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, sent a resignation letter to Pope Francis Tuesday saying she and her writing team were “throwing in the towel” because they felt “enveloped by a climate of distrust and progressive de-legitimization.”

Under the new direction of L’Osservatore Romano, “it seems to us that a vital initiative has been reduced to silence with a return to the antiquated and arid practice of top-down selection, under direct male control, of women deemed trustworthy,” she wrote.

Scaraffia said the team felt frustrated and undermined in their efforts and could no longer continue, while lamenting the end of a unique reality in the Church.

Donne Chiesa Mondo was “a new and exceptional experience for the Church,” Scaraffia said. “For the first time, a group of women, who organized themselves autonomously and voted internally for filling positions and hiring new writers, was able to work in the heart of the Vatican and the Holy See’s communications program, with free intelligence and heart, and with the agreement and support of two popes.”

Ms. Scaraffia told the Italian daily La Repubblica: “I am leaving together with all the staff of the insert on women. We disappeared from the pages of the newspaper and have been delegitimized. Evidently our editorial line was irritating. That’s why we are getting out.”

In her letter to the pope, Ms. Scaraffia suggested that a February article in Donne Chiesa Mondo on the sexual abuse of nuns by priests had chilled relations with the newspaper’s editors, who began giving the women a cold shoulder.

“We could no longer be silent: the trust that so many women had placed on us would have been seriously compromised,” Scaraffia wrote in defense of her report.

For his part, the editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano, Andrea Monda, who began in his new post last December 18, denied Ms. Scaraffia’s accusations, insisting he had guaranteed Scaraffia and her team the same “complete autonomy” and “total freedom” they had always been accorded.

Mr. Monda also claimed, in a statement made available by the Vatican to Breitbart News, that he had never imposed personnel decisions on the editorial team of the monthly insert, but that he had limited his engagement to “suggesting topics and persons to engage,” which was “to be freely evaluated by Prof. Scaraffia and the editorial staff.”

“I acknowledge Prof. Scaraffia’s free and autonomous decision to discontinue her cooperation with L’Osservatore Romano,” Monda said.

“Along with our very best wishes, we offer her our sincere thanks for the valuable work she has done in these years, with great commitment and in full freedom,” he said.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome