Here’s What to Know About the First Female Vatican Prefect in the Catholic Church’s History

A few years earlier, in July 2019, Brambilla and six other women became the first members of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

Brambilla, who as secretary oversaw the apostolic visitation to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter and the suppression of the Carmelite Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Arlington, Texas, served for 13 years as superior general of the Consolata Missionaries.

She joined the congregation in 1988 and was sent to Mozambique as a missionary. The nun was also the order’s first general councillor. This experience allowed her to write a thesis on evangelization and inculturation in the African country and to obtain a doctorate in psychology in 2008 at the Gregorian Institute of Psychology, where she also taught.

The nun is also a professional nurse, practicing at the hospital in Merate, Italy.

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In October 2023, in an interview with ACI Stampa, CNA’s Italian-language news partner, the nun shared that “the experience of fruitful contact with different realities, peoples, cultures, particular Churches, forms of Consecrated Life in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe has transformed me and strengthened in me the awareness that the encounter with others is a source of growth, of exchange of gifts, of grace” with the call to “sow the Gospel” and make it germinate everywhere.

What can be done to renew consecrated life?

In that interview, Brambilla answered the question on what can be done to renew consecrated life as follows: “I feel the need and desire to study with those who have much more knowledge and wisdom than me and who have long offered their skills and their energies of mind, heart, and soul to accompany the paths of consecrated men and women in different fields.”

In this way, she continued, she will be able to help others better, also considering the importance of listening to “everyone, their various experiences and paths, is a fundamental step to let the Spirit guide us, to open our hearts, our inner senses to his light… so that he may show us his ways, to walk with them together.”

The nun also highlighted the importance of “littleness” when questioned about the lack of vocations in the Church, offering as a point of reference a speech by Pope Francis in September 2022 in Kazakhstan.

Brambilla quoted, among others, the following passage: “the Gospel says that being ‘little,’ poor in spirit, is a blessing, the first beatitude, because smallness humbly gives us the power of God and leads us to not base our ecclesial activity on our own capacities. This is a grace! I repeat: There is a hidden grace in being a small Church.”

In January 2024, the new prefect gave an interview to the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire in which she said that her appointment as secretary of the Dicastery for Consecrated Life “finds its place within an ecclesial path that is increasingly synodal, open, inclusive, dialogical, and evangelical” and in which she noted what Pope Francis had said in his homily on Jan. 1 a year ago.

“The Church needs Mary in order to recover her own feminine face, to resemble more fully the woman, Virgin and Mother, who is her model and perfect image, to make space for women and to be ‘generative’ through a pastoral ministry marked by concern and care, patience and maternal courage,” the pope said at that time in the excerpt cited by the nun.

Asked whether her appointment would “demasculinize” the Catholic Church, the new prefect emphasized that “this is a reflection to be continued and expanded by everyone but also to be translated into an effective practice that certainly passes through a greater participation of women at the various levels of the life of the Church.”

It also requires “a careful study of the feminine dimension of the Church and of the mission in the broadest sense: models and dynamics of thought, affection, sensitivity, spirituality, action, mission that embody the two vital dimensions, the feminine and the masculine, and take into account the necessary, beneficial, and blessed interaction between the two.”

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Despite the questions it may have raised, Brambilla’s appointment does not contradict Church teaching. Although the ministerial priesthood is reserved for men, the Church recognizes the equal dignity and complementarity of men and women.

Pope Francis has emphasized the need for a “more incisive female presence in the Church” and this appointment is a step in that direction. Brambilla’s appointment does not entail sacramental functions reserved for the priesthood but rather an administrative and pastoral leadership role that reflects the richness of the gifts and abilities that women bring to the Church, as demonstrated by the long history of influential women in Catholicism.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.