CORK (IRELAND)
Irish Examiner
February 20, 2019
The Pope turned to one of his closest advisers: “Who is betraying me? The Church is not going in the direction I want it to go in.”
This is actually dialogue from the Sky TV series The Young Pope, starring Jude Law as Pope Pius XIII. But it could be something a Vatican correspondent might overhear any day in exchanges between Pope Francis and one of his advisers in the Casa Santa Martha, where the 81-year-old Argentine resides.
One difference is that Pius XIII’s trusted adviser is a nun, Sister Mary (played by Diane Keaton), whereas there is no woman in Francis’s inner circle. Many people, including some of his friends, believe that a female perspective might have steered him clear of some problems, including a few that were self-created.
This is a troubled papacy. The addition of a woman to its inner circle wouldn’t undo the difficulties Francis is now saddled with, but it might provide a bulwark against others. And it is by no means a novel idea.
When Eugenio Pacelli was papal nuncio to Germany in the 1920s, he met a young Bavarian nun in a nursing home, while he was convalescing. And when he was recalled to Rome, in 1930, by Pope Pius XI, to take up the post of secretary of state, he arranged for the nun, Sr Pascalina, to follow him and to head his household in the Vatican.
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