Pope Francis’ audience with the editorial staff of the monthly magazine “Donne Chiesa Mondo”
The woman “has the ability to have three languages together: that of the mind, that of the heart and that of the hands. And she thinks what she feels, she feels what she thinks and does, she does what she feels and thinks. I’m not saying all women do that, but they have that ability, they have it. This is great.” These are words that Pope Francis addressed to the editorial staff of “Donne Chiesa Mondo” in the audience that took place in the Sala dei Papi of the Apostolic Palace yesterday morning. The occasion was given by the tenth anniversary of the monthly de The Osservatore Romano and from the fourth anniversary, with the next May issue, of the current committee coordinated by Rita Pinci who, in the name of the entire editorial staff, addressed the Pontiff underlining the beauty of teamwork.
In his “short but intense speech”, he reports The Osservatore Romano, Francesco confided that he had read “Donne Chiesa Mondo” “since Professor Scaraffia was the coordinator”. “I’ve always read it, because I like it, I like this challenge which is already in the title,” he specified.
And then she added: «Women have an ability to manage and think that is totally different from us and also, I would say, superior to us, in another way. We see it in the Vatican too: where we have placed women, things change immediately, they go on. We see it in daily life, many times I saw it when I passed by bus, queuing to visit their children and women there in prison: the woman who never leaves her child, never! And I remember a good trade unionist, who died, who told me that at the age of 20-21 he gave himself up to the good life and lived with his mother, both poor, and he slept in the hall of the small house; in the morning he, still drunk from the night before, would see his mother come out of her room, stop, look at him tenderly and go off to work, as a maid, for a minimum wage. It was that look, “strong and mild” – so she told me – “that one day she touched my heart and I changed”. And this man has become a great trade unionist.’
“Women, women: we use the feminine as a thing of waste, a game, a joke”, the Pope underlined. “Once – he continued, quoting the president of the European Commission – I asked Von der Leyen “I tell me, madam: you are a doctor and have seven children, whom you call on the phone every afternoon; you tell me: how did you manage to unblock that opposition of the EU Report to Europe during the Covid, the question of the Benelux and some other country that opposed it, as you did?”. She looked at me and in silence and began to gesticulate with her hands in an industrious way, I looked at her carefully, observing her hands and finally she said: “Like we mothers do”.
It’s like this, it’s another way, it’s another category of thought, but not only thought: thought, feeling and works». Hence the emphasis on the fact that women have precisely “the ability to have three languages together: that of the mind, that of the heart and that of the hands”. «For this – Francis concluded before greeting all those present – I like to read and encourage this monthly, and it is not a sort of clerical feminism of the Pope, no! It is opening the door to a reality, a reflection that goes beyond. For this I thank you so much and now I greet you one by one».