Another Laywoman in the Vatican

Another Laywoman” is to emphasize that most, if not all, the women in the Vatican that I have written about are religious sisters. Sisters and nuns are laywomen and we rejoice in their placement in or very near the locus of decision-making in the Church. But they are different from most other laywomen.

Pope Francis has been adding elements to one laywoman’s job that I want to note. Last year, Emilce Cuda was invited to Rome to be “Office Head” of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. ¬This February she was promoted to “Co-Secretary” and in April she was made a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Francis tends to bestow multiple roles on the sisters, I’ve noted, but this time he’s choosing a married woman theologian whose husband accompanied her to Rome. I don’t know the breakdown of married and single women in the universal church, but I’d guess there are more married women than nuns.

Christopher White profiled Cuda this week in NCR online and in print. I started thinking about Francis’s giving multiple jobs to women he knows and trusts, who have been mostly nuns. I conclude that he trusts Cuda. She obtained her degrees from Buenos Aires universities. White says her “one-line sound bite” is as “a theologian focusing on social problems” and he continues:

And like her boss in Rome, she is interested first and foremost in the people.
As a practitioner of teología del pueblo (“theology of the people”), Cuda not only believes in a preferential option for the poor, but maintains that it requires standing with the poor as a vocal advocate, particularly so that they are participants in economic decision making.
For that reason, her work has zeroed in on questions related to employment and unemployment, labor unions, popular movements and populism.

This is good for a person in both her appointed roles, and that sympathy with Francis’s world view maybe got her there. White comments that in the past the Latin American “commission may have had a reputation as a supervisory body or even doctrinally policing the church in Latin America,” which I find a delicate critique of those in previous papacies who condemned liberation theology. The link included here is to an interview with Rodrigo Guerra López, the layman appointed as Secretary of the Latin American Commission when Cuda was appointed Office Head. He now is Co-Secretary with her, a nice turn to equality. They are both oriented to service, not doctrine.

Cuda’s horizon extends to integrating Latin America with the rest of the church. She’s the one who got Francis to participate in that conversation with students in both American hemispheres that Ellie Harty LINK wrote about a few weeks ago. That suggests to me a level of comfort with Francis that I find encouraging. I have been convinced that Francis is so much more open to LGBT concerns than those of women because he has known many gay men throughout his life in a men’s religious order and in a gender-restricted profession.  They are not an abstraction to him as women and BTQI+ people often seem to be.

But back to Cuda. That Zoom with students was sponsored by Loyola University Chicago, where Cuda is a visiting professor, and she’s had many other positions as well. Her first book, only in Spanish, is Democracy and Catholicism in the United States: 1792–1945, and her most recent is Reading Francis – Theology, Ethics and Politics, only in Spanish and Italian. Very political for a theologian.

And I wonder: Is she concerned with gender issues? I find two answers, and I find the sequence encouraging.

In 2017, Francis hagiographer Austin Ivereigh dialogues with her in Crux.  Her contributions are in quotation marks, Ivereigh’s are not; my comments are in brackets:

As a woman theologian, she is frustrated that people always want her to talk about the theology of women rather than her specialty, which is the ethics of politics. “We need more women theologians, but involved in other fields of theology.” As long as women theologians are writing only about gender and feminism, she says, “they won’t advance in other areas where they have a necessary contribution to make.” [Unremarkable] … 

“The woman still doesn’t have a proper space in the Church, but nor does she in other spaces…So you have to ask if the place that women have in Catholicism isn’t the same as they have in other spaces.” [Not exactly.]

Except, of course — I point out — this issue is clouded by clericalism, which tends to confuse power of governance with sacramental power, meaning that tasks that could or should fall to lay people are often done by clergy, a fact that tends—artificially — to accentuate the absence of women. [It’s not artificial, Ivereigh.]

“We have to refine categories,” she agrees. “We shouldn’t confuse the hierarchy of the Church with the Church as the people of God.” [Of course not, but…]

 “When a woman is badly treated — paid less, for example — because she is a woman, we have to remember the cause: the problem is in the system.” [Agreed!]

In 2022, journalist Lucia Capuzzi presents a different Cuda in the Woman Church World section of L’Osservatore Romano, of all places. Here Cuda makes me more positive than in my bracketed remarks above:

“The root cause of women’s exclusion is the same as the exclusion of the poor”, says the theologian. As with them, the first way in which they are discarded is to make them invisible. “Let’s consider the informal labor, a category that includes two billion people. Their work, done day to day to survive, makes a fundamental contribution to the economy but is not accounted for. In official statistics, they do not exist. For the same reason, it is often said that there are no women in the Church. Sometimes the women themselves say so, reinforcing a narrative that make them invisible. It depends on what we mean by the Church. If it is just the hierarchy we are referring to, that is true. However, if, as the Second Vatican Council states, it is the People of God, then women are very much there. They are in charge of transmitting the faith and materially supporting the Church too. To those who object that the absence concerns decision-making positions, I reply that there is a prior issue to be addressed: recognizing the many women workers already present, often without pay. Why do menial tasks always end up being done by women?”

My conclusion about Cuda from reading these three articles as well as others? She’s profoundly devoted to Francis, partly because of their sharded experience of Argentina. She’s passionate about the people, inequality, the poor, partly because she grew up poor. She’s both a theologian and a social scientist.

The only thing I don’t understand is who is speaking in the beginning of Capuzzi’s article. It does not sound like anything else from Cuda and I hope it’s not Ivereigh sexualizing her. But I don’t like anyone to discipline me, and so I hope it’s Cuda’s own words:

“Let’s not let ourselves be disciplined. Never. Let us continue to be passionate, seductive, to speak with the language of the word and the body. Let us continue to enchant. Now, more than ever, we need to return to enchanting the world. Sure, we’ll run the risk of being called crazy, as they did with the Beguines centuries ago. Nevertheless, it is worth it. That’s why I repeat: let’s not let ourselves be disciplined”.

Can you see a nun saying this?