Pope names first female dicastery head

The link between Holy Orders and Church governance is increasingly unclear…

By ITV staff

Italian Consolata Missionary Sister Simona Brambilla was secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life until being named its Prefect in January

Pope Francis promulgated Praedicate Evangelium, his new constitution on the structures and governance of the Roman curia, in 2022. One of the key reforms included said “any member of the faithful” can head a dicastery or office in the Roman Curia.

That provision has come to full fruition in 2025, as the Pope named on January 6 a member of the Consolata Missionaries order, Sister Simona Brambilla, as the first female Prefect of a Vatican dicastery in history.

Sister Brambilla, who turns 60 on March 27, now heads the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life — the first prefect not to wear, or be slated to wear, the red cardinal’s hat.

Also of interest is the simultaneous appointment of Cardinal Angel Fernández Artime, S.D.B., as the dicastery’s Pro-prefect.

Sister Brambilla, now the highest-ranking female in the Vatican Curia, is also a layperson. That could have made her a sort of test case for an expanded notion of the limits of lay governance in the Catholic Church — a topic which dovetails with the Pope’s desire to foster “synodality” in the Church.

But since there has been appointed a “pro-prefect” to lead the dicastery with her, some Vatican observers believe the move actually does little to develop any new understanding of Curial authority, since the cardinal pro-prefect will presumably sign the dicastery’s official rulings and pronouncements.

Thus the fundamental question of how essential Holy Orders — and the unique graces imparted to the bishops of the Church upon consecration — actual- ly is to the governance of the Church is not really resolved by the appointment of Sister Brambilla.

According to Canon Law, laypeople were allowed to “cooperate” in the governance of the Church. With Pope Francis’ reform, it is explicitly stated that “any member of the faithful can preside over a dicastery or office.” Yet some in the Church have found themselves unable to square this reform with the teachings of Vatican II.

As Catholic journalist and canon lawyer Ed Condon explains, “The Church says that bishops and others in positions of authority might exercise three kinds of functions, or munera, in the life of the Church — the offices of teaching, sanctifying and governing, which flow from the authority given by Jesus Christ to his apostles, and their successors. While the idea has always been important, Vatican II took special care to emphasize that bishops have a special share in those functions.”

Condon further points out that “This link between the sacrament of ordina- tion and the exercise of governing power in the Church is also defined in the Code of Canon Law, which says that ‘those who have received sacred orders are qualified, according to the norm of the prescripts of the law, for the power of governance, which exists in the Church by divine institution and is also called the power of jurisdiction.’”

Bishop Marco Mellino, then secretary of the council of cardinals that helped to draft Praedicate Evangelium, offered a different perspective: “[T]he power of governance is not given with sacred orders, but rather through the canonical provision of an office,” he stated in a report to top Curial officials — meaning any layperson could be vested with authority in the Curia only by virtue of their being given it by the Pope.

At the time Pope Francis’ reforms were promulgated in 2022, Dominican Father Pius Pietrzyk, adjunct professor of canon law at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, commented, “Any separation of Church governance from holy orders would amount to a fairly radical break from the vision put forth by the Second Vatican Council.”

Two cardinals who have at various times been considered close collaborators of the Pope, Canadian Cardinal Marc Oullet and German Cardinal Walter Kasper, also issued statements of concern at the time.

In Kasper’s opinion, he wrote, “a dualism between the authority sacramentally conferred by ordination and the authority of governance or jurisdiction conferred by mandate [of the Pope] could end up becoming detached from the sacramental life of the Church and could also develop a certain life of its own, with unhappy consequences.”