ROME – Pope Francis this week made the novel decision to appoint the first-ever woman as prefect of a Vatican department, naming Italian Consolata Sister Simona Brambilla as head of the Dicastery for Religious.

While several women serve in other important roles in the Vatican, including secretaries and undersecretaries of departments, with her appointment, Brambilla, 59, has become the first-ever woman to lead a Vatican dicastery.

However, in the Vatican’s Jan. 6 announcement of her appointment, it was also announced that Spanish Cardinal Ángel Fernández Artime, 65, the former head of the Salesian order, was named pro-prefect, although the Vatican didn’t fully explain what his exact role would be.

When Atrime was given a red hat by the pope in September 2023, many expected that he would be tapped to lead a Vatican department himself, so his current appointment ranking below a nun is noteworthy.

Established by Pope Sixtus V in 1586, the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life oversees some 700,000 consecrated men and women belonging to various religious communities around the world.

Women religious have long far outnumbered men, with Vatican statistics for 2024 showing that there are 559,228 women religious in the church today, compared to some 128,559 priests who belong to religious orders.

The assignment of a pro-prefect, however, is a novelty for the Dicastery for Religious.

A pro-prefect is a titled that has traditionally been assigned to a person set to eventually take over the role of prefect of a Vatican department, or, following the March 2022 publication of Pope Francis’s apostolic constitution reforming the Roman Curia, Predicate Evangelium, to a person running a department where the pope himself technically serves as prefect.

This is the case, for example, with the Dicastery for Evangelization, which, under Predicate Evangelium, is directly led by the pope as prefect, but is administered by two pro-prefects overseeing the dicastery’s two different sections, in this case Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle and Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella.

Artime’s appointment as pro-prefect in the Dicastery for Religious has been boiled down to a longstanding argument among canon lawyers and experts that because heads of some Vatican departments make binding decisions in the name of the pope, sharing in the exercise of his power, they therefore need to be in Holy Orders, meaning ordained to the priesthood.

Since Brambilla as a nun is technically considered a laywoman, having made vows but not received Holy Orders, the concern is that certain decisions involving issues related to Holy Orders would therefore be invalid.

In Predicate Evangelium, Pope Francis took a step toward distancing Holy Orders from the governing authority of the Roman Curia.

In point five of section two, “Principles and Criteria for the service of the Roman Curia,” he said that “Each curial institution carries out its proper mission by virtue of the power it has received from the Roman Pontiff, in whose name it operates with vicarious power in the exercise of his primatial munus.”

“For this reason, any member of the faithful can preside over a Dicastery or Office, depending on the power of governance and the specific competence and function of the Dicastery or Office in question,” it said.

Pope Francis had already named Italian layman Paolo Ruffini as head of the Vatican Dicastery for Communications in 2018, marking the first time a lay person had been tapped to lead a Vatican department. Now, Brambilla’s appointment makes her the first-ever woman to do so.

The appointment of Brambilla as prefect makes it clear that there is no question of who is ultimately in charge, and Artime’s appointment as pro-prefect is likely a bid by Francis to ensure that there is no question about the validity of her decisions, now or in a future papacy.

Whatever one makes of the debate over the necessary link between curial authority and Holy Orders, this move by Pope Francis is hardly a novelty.

For example, when Pope John Paul II named Sister Enrica Rosanna as undersecretary of Congregation for Religious in 2004, another priest undersecretary, Father Vincenzo Bertolone, was assigned at same time so there would be no question of validity of the decrees that Rosanna signed.

Pope Francis appears to have applied the same logic in this situation, making the novel decision to appoint a woman to an important role in the Roman Curia, while ensuring that there can be no disputing the validity of her decisions as prefect.

Brambilla joins a growing list of women who have been appointed to decision-making roles in Francis’s Vatican, following the appointment in 2021 of Italian Sister Alessandra Smerilli as secretary of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development.

The pope has also named women to various other top positions, including the appointment of laywoman Barbara Jatta as director of the Vatican Museums in 2016; the appointment of Sister Raffaella Petrini as secretary general of the governorate of the Vatican City State in 2022; and the appointment of Sister Helen Alford as president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 2023.

He has also, in 2022, named three women to a panel responsible for vetting new episcopal candidates within the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, giving women a say in the important role of approving who the Church’s new shepherds are.

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