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This past January, Pope Francis appointed Simona Brambilla, a member of the Consolata Missionary Sisters, to co-lead the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life alongside Cardinal Pro-Prefect Ángel Fernández Artime. This first-ever appointment of a woman as a Vatican prefect raised eyebrows, as did Francis’ earlier inclusion of women as voting participants in the Synod on Synodality.
Secular news outlets underscored its unprecedented nature. Within the Catholic Church, traditionalists and some canon lawyers raised objections about any non-ordained person, male or female, being authorized to govern institutes of consecrated life. Progressives, by contrast, while lamenting that Sister Brambilla has to share her post with a cardinal, welcomed the move as a historic step toward more inclusion of women in positions of ecclesial decision-making at high levels—again underscoring its unprecedented nature.
That it is newsworthy at all, 60 years after the Second Vatican Council, when women are given leadership positions by Catholic churchmen seems sufficient evidence to some observers that some feminist critics of Roman Catholicism have been right all along: that our religious tradition in general has a “woman problem” rooted in centuries of misogyny and patriarchal structures, especially our all-male clergy.
This is far from my own view. I accept the consistent teaching of the magisterium—which our newly elected Pope Leo XIV appears poised to uphold—that only men can be ordained to sacramental ministry. I also have a conservative reverence for papal authority and for clerical authority broadly where sacramental matters are concerned. Yet I agree that contemporary Catholicism has a woman problem.
To my view, though, the problem is not that the church is too beholden to its historical character in this area, but rather that Catholics suffer from widespread ignorance of important, historical precedents of both female and lay ecclesial leadership.
In fact, from the earliest centuries of Christianity to well after the post-Tridentine period, many women participated in ecclesial governance, and not just in advisory, subordinate roles under episcopal authority. Acknowledging that the examples I highlight below were minority cases within a patriarchal framework, I nevertheless propose that further considerations of women’s leadership in our church today, which are already proceeding with new energy at the start of a new pontificate, ought not proceed without awareness of them.
Decision-Making Women in Early Christianity
Beginning early in the first century, women served as leaders within the first Christian communities, including in Rome. There are references to such women in the letters of St. Paul and other Apostolic Era writings. Likewise, patristic sources contain many references to women who exercised various forms of ecclesial leadership.
Although we cannot establish much definitively about certain aspects of their leadership, given the limitations of the sources, we can say confidently that networks of pious Roman noblewomen sometimes played the important role of helping to select who should be the bishop of Rome—even in the fourth century, when those bishops began to be called popes. Liberius, for example, largely owed his election in 352 A.D. to Rome’s pious patrician ladies. These women helped ensure, further, that Liberius remained bishop of Rome when Emperor Constantius II attempted to replace him with the antipope Felix.
In the early medieval period, monastic abbesses came to prominence in parts of the growing Christian world, exercising governance not only over their own communities but also at times over affiliated men’s communities. In the British Isles, they also participated in local ecclesial synods alongside bishops, other clergymen and leading laymen.
Anglo-Saxon writers, including St. Bede and Stephen of Ripon, treated the presence of abbesses at local ecclesial councils as a matter of course. St. Mildred, the abbess at Minster-in-Thanet in Kent, participated in the Synod of Baccaneld of 694 along with four other abbesses. St. Hilda, the foundress of Whitby Abbey, was not only present at the first synod in Northumbria but hosted it inside her convent. This was the synod that adopted the method of calculating when Easter Sunday falls that was preferred in papal Rome, famously causing a rift with monks in Iona and Ireland.
It is even better documented that the Second Council of Nicaea, which settled the Iconoclastic Controversy, was called together and presided over by a woman: Irene of Athens, the regent and then ruler in her own right of the Byzantine Empire who lived from around 750 to 803. According to the historian Judith Herrin, Empress Irene chose Tarasios, a layman she trusted, to be ordained and serve as the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. With Tarasios at her side, Irene presided over the final session of the council in 787—not Pope Adrian I, with whom she was in cordial correspondence, and who stayed home in Italy.
That session pronounced definitively on the matter of how images of Christ, his mother, saints and angels could be employed in Christian worship, something that had been violently dividing Christians for decades.
Female Rulers and Territorial Abbesses
Irene is also known for having deposed and blinded her own son, who was a bit too friendly with some Iconoclasts. But since there have been plenty of popes and bishops over the centuries who were guilty of peccadilloes, Machiavellian ruthlessness and worse, but whose authority Catholics do not question, a well-rounded history of women’s participation in ecclesial governance has room for some women whose moral records are similarly questionable.
Notable in this vein was Marozia, a Roman noblewoman and the mother of Pope John XI. In the early 10th century, Pope John X made Marozia, in an unprecedented ceremony, senatrix of Rome. She was the de facto ruler of the young, newly sovereign Papal States for several decades, working to protect them from domination by the Holy Roman Empire to the north—in one instance by deposing and murdering the same John X and replacing him with Leo VI.
Going on to have several more of her preferred candidates take the papal throne, including her son John XI, Marozia was accused by pro-imperial chroniclers, decades after the facts in question, of having had an affair with an earlier pope, Sergius III. She has in consequence been characterized as a villain in traditional historical accounts of this period. Yet, ironically, none of the popes connected to her are regarded as antipopes.
A medieval woman more beloved in traditional Catholic histories is St. Adelaide of Italy, the consort, mother and grandmother, respectively, of the first three Holy Roman emperors named Otto. Her participation in high-level ecclesial governance was celebrated by churchmen of her era. Just an infant at the end of Marozia’s rule, she became in succession the Queen of Italy and Queen of the Germans, and in 962 she was crowned and consecrated by Pope John XII—in an unprecedented way—as Holy Roman empress and co-ruler of her husband Otto I’s empire.
Indeed, John XII developed a new rite for her consecration that linked her to a tradition of sacred queenship going back to the biblical Esther.
Adelaide went on to use her papally sanctioned powers to found and protect various ecclesiastical institutions. She also helped to reform lax and corrupt monasteries as an indispensable friend of two saintly Benedictine abbots, Majolus and Odilo of Cluny, favoring their great Cluniac Reform—the most famous international monastic reform effort of the medieval period. Later in life, while governing the Holy Roman Empire as regent for her grandson, her ecclesial interventions included founding Seltz Abbey in Alsace, giving the male Benedictines who joined it the right to elect their own abbot. She secured papal protection for this male community as well.
The historian Penelope Nash has further shown that Adelaide’s effective mode of ecclesial leadership was imitated by ruling women who came after her. Matilda of Canossa, the Margravine of Tuscany who militarily and materially made possible Pope Gregory VII’s famous Investiture Controversy slap-down of the future Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, was supported by the papacy in her exercise of some forms of governance over ecclesiastics. Pope Urban II even authorized her to summon the bishop of Mantua, who was trying to usurp her rights over a monastery tied to her patronage, and to order him—in her own name, and in the presence of another bishop and other prominent men—to peacefully restore to her and the monastery all that belonged to them.
Also in this era, some abbesses came to exercise a great deal of authority not only over their own local religious communities, but also over others across great distances. The abbesses at Fontevraud in France, for example, had authority by the late Middle Ages over at least 78 priories—all of them mixed male-and-female communities, with women having the more senior leadership positions within them. Some abbesses governed entire ecclesiastical territories called abbatial domains, which were similar in some respects to bishops’ dioceses. Such women (and the same was true of even more abbots) were considered to be prelates, because they exercised quasi-episcopal jurisdiction in territories not geographically part of an existing diocese.
Among such women were the princess-abbesses of Quedlinburg in Saxony and the imperial abbesses in Zurich. They governed their local churches, not just their own orders’ communities, in a range of ways except in sacramental matters. They did so with the recognition of popes, emperors, kings and neighboring bishops. The first princess-abbess of Quedlinburg, Matilda, was even in the 10th century called a metropolitan, or overseer of bishops, including in her ceremony of consecration as an abbess. At one point, she not only attended but called together an ecclesial synod at Dornberg.
Collective Catholic memory of such abbesses, their male counterparts and their participation in a variety of areas of ecclesial governance gradually faded after various abbatial domains were dissolved and otherwise transformed amid the tumult of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation and the European revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Leading Women of the Early Modern Church
The same is true of our collective memory of many late medieval and early modern queens who enforced ecclesial law and led the Catholic Church on the ground throughout Christendom. Isabella of Castile is a clear example. Much better remembered for sending Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic and for establishing the dreaded Spanish Inquisition throughout her domains, she also was given the power by three successive popes to appoint numerous bishops and other ecclesiastical officials throughout her domains. This enabled her, and her husband Ferdinand alongside her, to oversee a much-needed reform of corrupt religious houses and episcopal sees suffering from chronic episcopal absenteeism.
Further along in the 16th century, Queen Marguerite of Navarre tried to keep reform-minded Catholics and followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin from irrevocably splitting. To this end, she appointed as bishop of Oloron in her kingdom the reform-minded priest Gérard Roussel, who instituted vernacular preaching and instructions on the Creed and ecclesial laws in his diocese.
To the north, Queen Mary I of England, Isabella of Castile’s granddaughter, did her best to restore the Roman Catholic clerical hierarchy, liturgy, and religious and educational institutions in her realm after not a few consecrated Catholic bishops and pastors (it is often forgotten) had chosen to break with the papacy and help her father King Henry VIII and her brother King Edward VII appropriate and suppress these things in prior years.
In the meantime, Juana of Austria, Mary’s sister-in-law and the regent of Spain in the mid-16th century, employed her power to protect and help build up a new religious order, the Jesuits, during a period when they faced great opposition from ecclesiastical officials in Spain. Eventually, with Juana’s support, the Jesuits became officially favored by the Crown of Spain and were authorized—by the Spanish monarchy, as bishops and popes largely did not decide such appointments then—to serve as missionaries in the Americas and parts of Asia. Where Juana is remembered today, however, it is typically in connection to her being permitted to take vows secretly as a Jesuit scholastic, despite the order’s general exclusion of women.
By the late 16th century, the enforcement of various norms of the reforming Council of Trent depended upon ruling Catholic laywomen as well as laymen. In the Spanish Netherlands, for example, the implementation of Trent and the establishment of reformed Catholic religious orders that confidently embodied and advanced the council’s aims—including the Discalced Carmelites, Capuchins and Jesuits—owed much to the equally sovereign Isabella Clara Eugenia of the House of Habsburg and her husband Albert of Austria. Bishops in their domains regularly had to negotiate with—and defer to—Isabella and Albert, as well as the papal curia, to make fervently post-Tridentine Catholicism a reality on the ground in northwestern Europe, not just the dream of document-writing Vatican bureaucrats.
Female Catholic rulers’ ecclesial interventions reached their zenith in the 18th century with those wielded by the at-times militantly Catholic Habsburg empress, Maria Theresa of Austria. Pope Clement XIII accepted her bold request to be recognized by the Holy See as Regina Apostolica (“Apostolic Queen”).
Clement XIII’s successor, Clement XIV, barely raised an eyebrow after Maria Theresa changed which Catholic feast days would be publicly celebrated in her domains; after she imposed taxes on clergymen previously exempt from them; after she established seminaries and regulated what would be taught in them; after she imposed new entrance requirements for postulants and novices of various religious orders within her domains; and even after she suppressed certain religious congregations and asserted a right to determine the future not only of their properties, but also of the ordained and vowed persons attached to them.
She did much of this against the wishes of some high-ranking churchmen within and beyond her empire, but with the enthusiastic compliance of many others.
Prominent abbesses and female rulers were not the only women involved in high-level ecclesiastical decision-making in the early modern period. St. Teresa of Ávila, for instance, went forward with her historic reform and leadership of the new Discalced Carmelite communities that she founded—including monasteries for men as well as convents for women—against the wishes of some local bishops, Inquisition officials and Carmelite superiors in Spain,thanks to direct authorizations to do so by both Pope Gregory XIII and King Philip II. Similarly, St. Louise de Marillac, who founded the Daughters of Charity, led and developed her innovative institute for years across multiple diocesan borders, doing so before receiving official sanction from individual local bishops and even from the pope.
Where early modern, non-royal and non-consecrated Catholic laywomen are concerned, historical records abound with evidence that they sometimes exercised major forms of ecclesial leadership. This, indeed, is the area of historical research that first interested me in the subject and led me to write a book on a French noblewoman of the 17th century, Marie de Vignerot, the duchess of Aiguillon, who was the niece and heiress of Cardinal Richelieu, the first minister of state to King Louis XIII.
During and long after her uncle’s lifetime, Vignerot was involved in the selection of French bishops, including for new missionary dioceses in Asia and North America that were erected by Pope Alexander VII, largely because she convinced him to do so after several prominent clergymen had failed to accomplish this. She succeeded in part because of her enticing offer to bankroll them and to help supply them with good bishops and priests affiliated with the new Séminaire des Missions Étrangères in Paris—a seminary she was also involved in founding.
Furthermore, Vignerot exercised control over Vincentian missions in North Africa and Madagascar, as well as some domestic French Vincentian missions, as one of her friend St. Vincent de Paul’s most powerful patrons. She was responsible, too, for the foundation of Catholic hospitals, seminaries, schools, convents, new institutes of consecrated life and an array of other ministries in France, in papal Rome and in mission contexts across the globe. And she was praised as one of the leading Catholics in all of Europe by Pope Alexander VII and other prominent churchmen of her day. St. Vincent de Paul’s first biographer, Bishop Louis Abelly, believed her name and reputation as a pillar of the Catholic Church would be remembered for ages to come.
The Situation Today
Vignerot is largely forgotten today, however. While this has proved to be a boon for my labors as a historian, the degree to which her story as I have written it seems so surprising to modern people, especially to Catholics with some background in ecclesiastical history and French history, seems indicative of that “woman problem” to which I referred at the outset. In presuming that it is a radical, unprecedented thing for Catholic women to exercise ecclesial leadership at high levels, we are demonstrating how cut offwe are from our own Catholic past, not how constrained we are by its no-doubt patriarchal norms.
I wonder how reactions to Pope Francis’ high-level appointments of women would have differed—across the entire traditionalist-progressive spectrum—if every Catholic commentator had learned somewhere along the way even half of the aforementioned history, either from better informed Catholic educators or from historically rigorous and well-rounded resources promoted by Catholic leaders. I suspect they would not have universally characterized what the late pope was up to in this area as so “unprecedented,” let alone raised their eyebrows in such predictable unison.
Instead, I think that, at this start of Leo XIV’s pontificate, we already would be having a more mature discussion about how Francis’ appointments were in some ways consistent with, and in others different from, various precedents in Catholicism’s deep and rich past. We might also be less focused, in what seems to me a modern, clericalist mode, on the question of a female diaconate.
We might be debating the question, related to lay involvement in non-sacramental areas of ecclesial governance, that the papal canonist Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J., has posed. How definitively rooted, truly, in developing Catholic thought and practice over the centuries, is the often-repeated dictum of modern churchmen that holy orders and ecclesial governance per se—in areas beyond the sacramental, such as the disciplining of clergy and religious—are inseparably bound together?
I am hopeful that our new Holy Father, who as Cardinal Robert Prevost worked closely with several women Francis had also controversially appointed to the Dicastery of Bishops, will foster a debate over this that is simultaneously historically informed, responsive to present-day attitudes and reverent toward longer-term, not just recent, Catholic tradition.
