The Pope’s respect for women: from words to deeds
International Women’s Day is celebrated worldwide on March 8. Pope Francis and respect for women of the world
On International Women’s Day, among hundreds of different initiatives, one thing that stands out is Pope Francis’ leitmotif: the word “respect.” It is repeated in every message, year after year, but it is not empty rhetoric. Especially since the latest appointments in the Vatican, which he strongly desired, show how much this pope cares about women and holds them in high regard.
Today, in fact, there is no need to say, but to do. To show in gestures and actions that seriously one believes not only about equality among human beings, but also about the added value and peculiarities of each one.
In the specific case of women, the Pope captured in them “their unique capacity for compassion, their intuitiveness and their connatural inclination to care” for their neighbor, reasoning that they “know how to put love where this is not there and humanity where human beings struggle to find themselves.”
Last year, in his prayer intention for the month of April, the call was very clear: “Let us respect women. Let us respect them in their dignity, in their fundamental rights. If we don’t, our society will not move forward.”
On that occasion, she recalled all those women in many parts of the world “treated as the first waste material,” discriminated against, subjected to prohibitions, obligations and brutal practices, deprived of the right to education and freedom.
And also in 2024, on the eve of March 8, speaking at the International Inter-University Congress titled “Women in the Church: makers of the human,” he stressed the urgency of “identifying appropriate ways for the greatness and role of women to be more valued.”
Therefore, not only should inequalities be nullified, but they need to be valued, given responsibilities, assigned positions: in society and in the Church. Going into more detail, it is a discourse he also refers to women religious, to whom he clarified at the end of January that “the mission of the nuns is to serve the least, and not to be someone’s servants.” And to whom he presented facts and concrete examples, such as Sister Simona Brambilla and Sister Raffaella Petrini.
In the same vein moves spazio + spadoni, who has identified in women religious and in the many congregations
cells from which to launch generative paths of mercy, as well as autonomy.
Two years after the beginning of his pontificate, at the conclusion of the Angelus on March 8, 2015, Pope Francis called this Day “an occasion to reaffirm the commitment of women and the importance of the presence of women in our lives.”
For him, “without women, the world would be sterile [because] they bring life and transmit to us the ability to see beyond, to understand the world with different eyes, a more creative, patient and tender heart.”
He doesn’t give flowers, the pope, but his words toward the female gender make even more of an impression than roses and mimosas. They are caresses and gratifications. Like the ones he uttered in 2020:
“Woman is the one who makes the world beautiful, who guards it and keeps it alive.
She brings you the grace that makes things new, the embrace that includes, the courage to give oneself. Peace is woman.
It is born and reborn from the tenderness of mothers. Therefore, the dream of peace is realized by looking to woman.
It is no accident that in the Genesis account the woman is taken from the rib of the man while he sleeps.
That is, woman originates near the heart and in sleep, during dreams.
Therefore she brings into the world the dream of love.
If we cherish the future, if we dream of a peaceful future, space must be given to woman.”