The entire staff of Women Church World, the women’s magazine that comes out once a month alongside L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, resigned on March 26.

Their reasons were numerous: The magazine’s editor, Lucetta Scaraffia, told the Associated Press that the new editor of L’Osservatore Romano, Andrea Monda, had attempted to take over her position; the editorial board wrote that L’Osservatore Romano had undermined Women Church World by recruiting women contributors who held competing viewpoints; and that these actions have led to “a vital initiative...being reduced to silence, to return to the antiquated and arid method of the top-down selection, under direct male control, of women who are perceived as being reliable,” according to an open letter to Pope Francis signed by Ms. Scaraffia.


Mr. Monda stated soon after the reports emerged of the staff resignations that he had not attempted to undermine the publication and that it would continue to be published, though it is uncertain at this time who the new editors will be.

When I interviewed Ms. Scaraffia in Rome in February, before the news of her resignation, she drew a parallel between the treatment of women in the Vatican and the experience of the staff at her magazine. She described how that situation has been changing over the last year after Women Church World gained international attention for reporting on women’s labor conditions in the Vatican and on sexual abuse of women religious by priests.

Editor’s note: Ms. Dulle conducted this interview for Inside the Vatican, America’s Vatican news podcast, when she was in Rome covering the sex abuse summit, a few weeks before the Women Church World resignations.

Ms. Scaraffia described how the women—mostly religious sisters—working in the Vatican have often been overlooked or dismissed by the men they work for. Often these women are not compensated for their work or do not receive contracts guaranteeing their compensation. She said they are bound by an expectation of unconditional obedience that keeps the sisters and their religious communities in financially unstable positions that are vulnerable to abuses of power, particularly in the houses of bishops and cardinals where religious sisters do the cooking and cleaning.

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Ms. Scaraffia described the spaces women have carved out for themselves to speak freely as “a hidden schism in the church, where the religious are separating themselves from the church.”

The Women Church World report on women’s labor in the Vatican quoted one African sister who explained how “in some of these sisters, all this stirs up a very strong inner rebellion. They feel profound frustration but are afraid to speak out about it because behind it all there may be very complex histories.” The report cites as an example situations in which a particular religious community may be providing financial support for a sister’s family members.

According to the African sister, these women religious do not feel that they can speak up about their abuse for fear of losing financial support. “If one of these religious returns to her country, her family does not understand. They say to her: ‘But how capricious you are!’

“These sisters feel indebted,” the African sister said. “They feel bound and so they keep quiet.”

But since the report on labor conditions at the Vatican was published in March 2018, women have begun speaking up—many times in the pages of Women Church World.

The magazine published excerpts from a manifesto calling for greater respect and a “female alliance” of women in the church opposite its report on labor, and its report on religious sisters being sexually abused by priests in its February 2019 issue led Pope Francis for the first time to acknowledge the problem publicly and to say that preventing this abuse was a priority for the church.

This new willingness among women to speak out about their abuse—not only in Women Church World and the secular press but in YouTube videos that are “like a message in a bottle” on “the sea of the internet.”

Ms. Scaraffia described this new willingness among women to speak out about their abuse—not only in Women Church World and the secular press but in YouTube videos that are “like a message in a bottle” on “the sea of the internet”—as a result of the quiet freedom women in the Vatican have found precisely because they are overlooked.

She explained the phenomenon this way: “In the church up to now, it has been very easy for a woman to live autonomously because the priest does not see her. The priests don’t think the women are anything. And that’s a freedom for the women in a sense.

“The liberty is that they don’t exist,” she said. “So if they don’t exist, they can do anything. It’s the same story with Women Church World, our magazine, where we have had a lot of liberty from the L’Osservatore Romano.... The magazine wasn’t anything. It wasn’t important. And so we have had a lot of freedom.”

Ms. Scaraffia described the spaces women have carved out for themselves to speak freely as “a hidden schism in the church, where the religious are separating themselves from the church.”

“They create autonomous worlds. They try to have very little connection to...the official church. The only thing they ask priests for is to celebrate Mass. Only that. And everything else, they do for themselves, all by themselves,” Ms. Scaraffia said. She lamented this hidden separation as a sad result of the lack of collaboration between men and women in the church.

But that freedom to speak in places where few were listening may be ending precisely because so many more people have begun to pay attention. According to Ms. Scaraffia and members of the editorial board, it was only when the world began to notice the work of Women Church World earlier this year that the leadership of L’Osservatore Romano first attempted to replace Ms. Scaraffia and then began “the indirect attempts to delegitimize us,” as Ms. Scaraffia told the Associated Press.

The resignations of Ms. Scaraffia and her staff raise questions about the viability within the church of spaces like Women Church World in which Catholic women, especially women religious, feel they can speak freely about their experiences of injustice.