With women “more reality and less talk” Two new appointments in church government

These are two weighty appointments in the Curia to report on, those of Simona Brambilla and Silvana Piro. For the high-level appointment and their role, they confirm that the tent flaps, are slowly widening.

Francis arranged their appointments a few days apart, which confirmed once again that he thinks, “Running an economy means taking care of the common home, and this will not be possible if we do not have eyes trained to see the world commencing from the peripheries, i.e. the gaze of the excluded, and of the lowly. So far, the gaze on the home that has stood out has been that of men, of males, generally Western and Northern. We have left out for centuries-among others-the gaze of women. If they had been present, they would have made us see fewer commodities and more relationships, less money and more redistribution, more attention to the haves and have-nots, more reality and less abstraction, more body and less talk. We can no longer continue to exclude different ways of seeing from economic practice and theory, as well as from the life of the Church”. This was the message he stressed when speaking at the Economy of Francis movement, to which young boys and girls had gathered.

Sister Simona Brambilla, former Superior General of the Institute of Consolata Missionaries (Italy) is the new secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, of which she has been a member since 2019.
This 58-year-old Italian nun born in Monza has a long curriculum; a diploma as a professional nurse received in 1986, in 1988 in the Consolata Missionaries, ten years later a Licentiate in Psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University.

In 1999, she was in Mozambique, where she was involved in youth ministry at the Macua Xirima Study Center in Maua; from 2002 to 2006, she was a lecturer at the Institute of Psychology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and there she received her doctorate in psychology in 2008. She is the second nun to become number two at a Vatican dicastery after Alessandra Smerilli, a Salesian of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians and an economist, who has been at the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development since 2021.
Sister Silvana Piro, on the other hand, was appointed undersecretary of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.
Sister Silvana Piro is Italian, and a member of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Child Jesus. She has so far served as bursar general of her religious institute. Born 51 years ago in Torre del Greco, in the province of Naples, after graduating in Business Administration from the University of Pisa, she pursued a postgraduate MA in Innovation Management at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. In 2008, she was awarded a BA in Theology at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome. In 2009, she made her perpetual profession. From 2008 to 2012, she collaborated with the youth ministry of the Archdiocese of Perugia-Città della Pieve.