Does Francis’ female prefect square the circle on lay governance?
The appointment of a cardinal pro-prefect for the Dicastery for Religious could defuse a long-simmering canonical debate over the link between sacred orders and authority in the Church
Pope Francis blazed a new ecclesiastical trail on Monday, appointing the first female head of a curial dicastery by promoting Sr. Simona Brambilla, I.S.M.C, from secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life to become its new prefect.
While the event of a female prefect of a dicastery is news in itself, Fernández Artime’s appointment alongside Brambilla’s may ultimately prove just as significant, possibly indicating the settling of a long-running canonical debate during the Francis papacy on the scope and limits of lay governance in the Church, and the nature of the Roman curia.
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Immediately following the news of Brambilla’s appointment, media attention focused on the appointment’s historic nature — succeeding Cardinal João Bráz de Aviz, Brambilla is the first woman to occupy such a senior position in the Church.
Indeed, unless Francis intends to make more history in the coming months by changing the Church’s law and giving her a red hat, Brambilla will be the first prefect of the department not to be or become a cardinal since it was created in 1908.
Roman rumors of the pending appointment of a curial female prefect have been in circulation since the end of last summer, with speculation rife about which department could get a new leader.
But while some of that speculation hinged on which curial cardinals could be ripe for replacement — Brambilla replaces the 77-year-old Cardinal Aviz — some of the discussion also focused on which dicasteries could accommodate a lay prefect leading its work, and which might require a bishop to be able to exercise certain functions of ecclesiastical governance.
Lurking behind those discussions, though, has been a broader and deeper debate about the nature of ecclesiastical governance and its link to episcopal orders, which has been a live conversation throughout the Francis pontificate.
The pope’s decision to appoint a cardinal pro-prefect to serve alongside Brambilla appears to side-step that debate, and could signal the closing off of a push for a more radical vision of power and lay cooperation in the Church.
Traditionally, popes have only named pro-prefects of curial departments which they nominally lead themselves — for centuries the pope legally led the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with a cardinal pro-prefect running the department for him day-to-day. More recently, Francis has used the same arrangement for the Dicastery for the Evangelization, which he took personal headship of in his reform of the Roman curia in 2022.
In the case of the new leadership of DICLSAL, it seems possible, if not likely, that Fernández Artime’s appointment will allow him to serve as a kind of canonical executor role, formally signing off on certain acts of governance alongside Brambilla, and thereby side-stepping questions about which acts, if any, require episcopal consecration to effect.
In so doing, Francis may have closed down one of the more radical reform pushes to emerge under his pontificate.
In 2022, Francis promulgated Praedicate Evangelium, his new constitution on the structures and governance of the Roman curia. That text included a key reform that said “any member of the faithful can preside over a dicastery or office,” clearing the way for laymen and women to serve at the highest levels of the Holy See’s administrative apparatus, for the first time.
But that reform was contextualized in ways that canon lawyers found unclear, with some warning at the time that the plan — or certain interpretations, at least — could be at odds with the teachings of Vatican Council II.
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.
This link between the sacrament of ordination 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.”
Lay people, according to the code, “can cooperate in the exercise of this same power according to the norm of law.”
The extent of that cooperation, however, and the limits to what governing functions can be delegated to lay people, have been fiercely debated.
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Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J., a senior canon lawyer who helped draft the pope’s constitution, has in the past offered a maximalist interpretation of the roles open to lay people, saying “the power of governance in the Church doesn't come from the sacrament of Holy Orders, but from the canonical mission.”
In 2022, Ghirlanda seemed to endorse a theological argument which says that in the end, the only power of governance in the Church comes from the pope, and he can share it or delegate it as he likes. Bishops, according to some versions of that argument, have a strictly sacramental function, beyond which they operate under papal authority alone.
Ghirlanda’s comments caused a stir at the time. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, then the prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and the longest-serving member of Francis’ curia, called Ghirlanda’s arguments “a Copernican revolution in the governance of the Church, not in continuity with or even going against the ecclesiological development of Vatican Council II.”
Cardinal Walter Kasper, whom Pope Francis repeatedly credited as an inspiration and a mentor in the early years of his pontificate, warned that “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.”
On the other hand, there are some historical examples in support of Ghirlanda’s argument — like the mitered abbesses of past centuries, who sometimes exercised a kind of de facto ordinary authority over the ecclesiastical life in the territory surrounding their monasteries, while not being able to perform sacramental functions reserved to bishops.
In the immediate aftermath of Praedicate Evangelium, it appeared to many that Francis was tending towards an expansive view of lay governance.
That change raised eyebrows since Canon 134 of the Code of Canon Law defines major superiors as “ordinaries,” which are those “who at least possess ordinary executive power” of governance, even though the general canonical principle is that only “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.”
Nevertheless, since the reforms of 2022, canonical debate has continued about the scope of potential lay delegated governing authority.
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In the context of Sr. Simona Brambilla’s new role, DICSAL has a number of sensitive governing functions which, if exercised by a lay person alone, could seismically alter the ecclesiology of the Church’s self-understanding in relation to the episcopacy and the exercise of governance.
The department handles, for example, the governance of religious institutes of pontifical right, and the merging and suppression of all religious institutes.
Among the DICLSAL prefect’s responsibilities, it is possible, even likely, that many could be exercised by a lay person (male or female) with little canonical controversy.
However, many more would likely be seen by canonists to fall along a spectrum, with some falling in a debatable grey area and others considered radical departures, should a lay prefect exercise them on his or her own.
With that in mind, the appointment of Cardinal Fernández Artime as an effective episcopal co-signer for Brambilla to deploy would appear to be an artful resolution to an otherwise potentially revolutionary appointment.
Of course, it remains to be seen exactly how the role of pro-prefect will be developed at DICLSAL, and what day-to-day responsibilities will be assigned to Cardinal Fernández Artime.
It could be that he will be handed the brief for matters touching all matters of clerical discipline or governance, or some other discrete section of the dicastery’s work, or he may function more like an immediate deputy to Brambilla, offering her effective proxy use of his cardinalatial rank and episcopal consecration.
And it may be that, if the cardinal is given some specific section of work to manage, Brambilla might, in the end, issue acts of governance touching the most sensitive canonical aspects of her office all on her own.
But, for the time being, it appears Pope Francis may have found a way to square the circle of installing a lay person at the head of a senior Vatican department without necessarily upending the Church’s understanding of sacred orders and the power of governance.
I've always thought this was a debate that had profound academic ramifications, but not a lot of practical ramifications. Especially with regards to the Curia, they do not issue rulings in their own name. The entire vatican apparatus really is a unitary executive. Why that would preclude a layman I have never understood.
The biggest problem seems to be optics, in that nobody wants to portray rome as an absolute monarchy, where bishops are mere functionaries of the Pope should they be involved in curial governance. Which.... they are, at least in regard to curial governance. Nothing stopping a layman from participating in that aspect of governance at the behest of the pope outside of ruffling people's perceptions.
Yet those advocating those more radical reforms have little desire to do that for obvious reasons (in that they would still act in the popes name, and under his authority, not as MPs of a ceremonial monarch), and bishops and priests surely aren't likely to enthusiastically back a limiting of their prestige.
Yet I do think there will come a time when a future pope dispenses with the show and just delegates certain curial authority to a lay individual. In this Francis seems to be leaning in that direction.
After reading up on Sister Brambilla's career and work, it seems like an... ok pick.
We'll see how it goes. At least it's not a pick along the lines of the Undersecretary Sister(-in-name-only) Nathalie Becquart.
My one area of speculation is whether or not Sister Brambilla will reform the somewhat-recent changes to the Church's laws surrounding the formation of religious postulants and novices. It now takes a minimum 12 years to reach final vows. Many good women's orders were shocked and dismayed, and I distinctly remember reading somewhere a lament of one Mother Superior, something along this line: "how can I ask these ladies to undergo formation for 12 years to reach their vocation? It's like a woman going through a 12-year-long engagement to be married!"