ROME
Commonweal
Robert Mickens
For the first time ever a woman bishop has been welcomed inside the Apostolic Palace for an official meeting with pope. But don’t expect to find any photos in the Vatican’s official newspaper. L’Osservatore Romano buried within its pages a brief, picture-less article of Pope Francis’ high-level meeting on Monday with Lutheran Archbishop Antje Jackelén of Uppsala, the first woman to head the Church of Sweden. It seems the Centro Televisivo Vaticano (CTV) and the Vatican’s You Tube channel also tried to prevent any widespread distribution of visual images of the gathering—especially of the pope and Archbishop Jackelén greeting one another. Holy See media that did provide photos for the event generally showed solo pics of the visiting female prelate, although one of Vatican Radio’s departments displayed a screenshot from the CTV footage that showed Francis shaking the archbishop’s hand. In his talk, he addressed her as “Esteemed Mrs. Jackelén, esteemed Sister.”
It should be noted that this was not the first time Pope Francis has had a close encounter with a mitred woman. Last autumn he briefly greeted Bishop Catherine Waynick of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis at the end of a general audience in St. Peter’s Square. There are photos of that event, too. But officials at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, headed by Cardinal Kurt Koch, have downplayed such incidents. It could be that they, like those in the noli me tangere lobby inside the Vatican, are not comfortable with Francis welcoming people that popes usually don’t even meet. Or maybe they’re trying to protect the pope from being further attacked by the most extreme Catholic traditionalists. In any case, the Christian Unity folks followed the same strategy when Francis sent a homemade smartphone video to a conference of televangelists last year in the United States and when, some months later, he met a delegation of TV preachers at his Santa Marta residence.
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