Pope Francis on Thursday told the Vatican to appoint women and lay people to top jobs in the Curia, AFP reported. “The development of the role of women and lay people in the church and their appointment to leading roles in the dicasteries, with particular attention to multiculturalism, is of great importance,” the pontiff said.
While delivering his Christmas speech to the Roman Catholic Church’s central bureaucracy – also known as the Curia – he addressed the subject of internal resistance to his campaign to reform the Vatican administration, Reuters reported. In his 2014 address, Pope Francis had said that the Curia suffered from “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.
The pontiff asserted that there had been some “malevolent resistance” from some members of the bureaucracy to his reform campaign. He said that the Curia needed to be more multinational, more multicultural and probably less clerical, adding that lay men and women should be integrated into leadership roles.
Pope Francis further warned the Curia that the reform process had to lead to more than a cosmetic facelift to remove wrinkles. “Dear brothers, it’s not the wrinkles in the church that you should fear, but the stains!”, he said.
However, in November, the Pope had said that the ban on women from becoming priests was unlikely to change. The Catholic leader had reiterated that the Vatican believed women cannot be ordained because Jesus willingly chose men as his apostles.
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