Is this what you were thinking of? From the Detroit Free Press:
… The Vatican employee who established the Web site where Pope John Paul II’s teachings are posted in six languages is a U.S. Franciscan nun, Sister Judith Loebelein, nicknamed Sister Web.
One of the first female church lawyers to work at the Vatican is Sister Sharon Holland, a Michigan-born member of the Monroe-based Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns.
Holland’s boss, an Italian Salesian nun, was named last year as an undersecretary of a Vatican congregation, the first time a woman was promoted to a position held by priests since the 16th Century. Sister Enrica Rossana, now the third-ranking official in a Vatican congregation that oversees religious men and women, is vigorous, outgoing and proud of where she is.
“I am the only one, the only woman,” Rossana said this week about her one-year tenure as undersecretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. “John Paul II put me in this job.”
“The manpower shortage in the church – there just aren’t enough priests – will lead to major employment of women,” Paul Hofmann, a former New York Times correspondent and author of “The Vatican’s Women,” said Wednesday in Rome.
Joan Collemacine-Parenti, a Philadelphia native who earned a doctorate and taught romance languages at Temple University, has worked at the Vatican for more than 30 years. As a language specialist, she supervises translations for publications of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
“Things are a lot slower than they are in the States, but there is a direction” of giving women more visibility in Vatican posts, Collemacine-Parenti said. And she said Pope John Paul II backed up women in ways beyond job advancement, noting that the Vatican beefed up maternity leave compensation and flexibility for female employees.
Women’s advancement at the Vatican is due in part to their pursuit of degrees at pontifical universities. Sister Mary Pierre Jean Wilson, a member of the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Mich., has worked at the Vatican for seven years, after earning a canon law degree in Rome.
She is the first and only female lawyer working in the office dealing with Catholic universities for the Congregation for Catholic Education and most recently helped create a computerized list of more than 1,300 Catholic universities and institutes of higher learning across the world. India, the United States and the Philippines top the list for most Catholic institutions.
Collemacine-Parenti said women are gaining influence in Vatican advisory commissions and departments, some originated since the Second Vatical Council in the 1960s or under John Paul II. Women’s influence is greater among papal councils that deal with issues such as health care and ecumenical dialogue, with women comprising 35 percent of the staff of 11 papal councils, the Catholic News Service reported last year.
In 1994, the pope created the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a collection of scientists, economists and professors. Ten years later, he named Harvard University law professor Mary Ann Glendon to lead the panel, which advises the Vatican on social policy. Her position is the highest advisory position held by a woman at the Vatican.
Last year for the first time, John Paul II named two women – a U.S. nun and a German laywoman – to the Vatican’s top theology group, the International Theological Commission. The nun, Sister Sara Butler, a Toledo native who taught at Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary and is now at St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., attended her first commission meeting last October at the Vatican.
“I think the pope was eager to make sure women are involved,” Sister Butler said this week from New York state.
Her commission falls under the stewardship of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s top official on Catholic doctrine and a man now considered a leading contender to succeed John Paul. Butler’s homework for the next meeting later this year is to consider the theological fate of unbaptized infants, and how Catholic teaching requiring baptism for heavenly salvation reconciles their fate.
Contact PATRICIA MONTEMURRI at montemurri@freepress.com. Free Press religion writer David Crumm contributed to this report.
You know when I heard about this (or rather when I heard about it again …) I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be a tad scandalous to have Polish sisters live with him there in the Apostolic Palace and serve him?” … then on TV I actually saw the Polish nuns and they were REALLY OLD (like as an old as a grandmother or great grandmother) and I laughed to myself