Veronica SevillaWomen are a factor of change in the Church".Pope thanks women for building "a more humane society"."Women in high positions, inside and outside the Church, are called today to exercise their freedom to carry out the tasks that Pope Francis attributes to every leader: caring for the fragile and putting the dignity of the person back at the center of every decision. Knowing that the paradigm of the "management of care" constitutes an ethical reference point for any organization: we are all immersed in a network of relationships of dependence, which define who we are and what we will become, becoming fundamental for us and for others."
This is what Sister Raffaella Petrini, Secretary General of the Governorate of the City State of the City of The Vaticanon the occasion of International Women's Day. In his intervention in the second session of the Course of Specialization in Religious Information promoted by ISCOM and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Petrini transfers his reflection to the dilemma of leadership highlighted by the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, that is, the choice between competition and solidarity. "Competition," Bauman explains, "pushes human beings to advance their own position by imposing their own desires and interests on the other, or on others"; solidarity, on the other hand, presupposes that "men and women can live together in a collaborative way and can try to become, all of them, happier."
"Over the course of recent pontificates," Petrini observes, "especially with Pope Francis, much has been done to offer women the opportunity to express their freedom in more concrete ways, including by formally appointing them to positions of leadership, administration and management within ecclesial structures, including the Roman Curia and the Governatorate of Vatican City State."
Solidarity, a central principle of Christian social thought, is defined as follows by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical "Sollicitudo rei socialis" (1987): "It is, above all, interdependence, felt as a determining system of relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious components, and assumed as a moral category. When interdependence is thus recognized, the correlative response, as a moral and social attitude, as a "virtue", is solidarity. It is not, then, a feeling of vague compassion or superficial sympathy for the ills of so many people, near or far away. On the contrary, it is the firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good: that is, to the good of each and every one, because we are all truly responsible for all.
Three dimensions
In this regard, Sister Raffaella points out "three dimensions that, at least in my personal experience in this first year as Secretary General of the Governorate of Vatican City State, link expressions of solidarity within an organization".
First of all, the awareness of diversity, that is, the recognition of feminine qualities, according to which "women have innate gifts, including care for others, which can be traced above all in their structural capacity for motherhood, hence their readiness to welcome new life, to change and transformation, to protect vulnerability, to sacrifice and to relate to otherness". Among the corollaries, according to the Secretary General of the Governorate of Vatican City State, are attention to people's needs, the responsibility generated by the desire to meet those needs, professional competence and respect. These are all ingredients that are at the origin of the effective functioning of any organizational system.
The complexity of modern organizations - the second dimension of the Franciscan nun's analysis - "necessarily requires a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving and the willingness, therefore, to seek out and welcome the contribution of different skills, both soft and hard". This is an issue that concerns the Governance itself, divided into seven directorates, of very different nature and functions, which collaborate with the President, the Secretary General and the Deputy Secretary General to carry out the institutional activities of Vatican City State: 1) Infrastructures and Services; 2) Telecommunications and Information Systems; 3) Economy4) Security and Civil Protection Services; 5) Health and Hygiene; 6) Museums and Cultural Heritage; 7) Papal Villas.
Finally, service as an essential attitude of leadership. In the four pillars identified since the 1970s by the American researcher Robert Greenleaf, and schematized as follows by Petrini: service to employees, which, reinforced by internal motivation, fosters productivity; a holistic approach to work, according to which work is for man, and not vice versa; the sense of community, in the awareness of a shared fragility that requires mutual support; the sharing of decision-making power, fostered by less verticalist and more flexible and horizontal structures.
From the unfolding of the dimensions described above flows the aptitude for caring for things, which we are called to manage and not to possess, as the Pope's last Motu Proprio on Original Law also reminds us, and for people, for the human capital capable of making organizations function, beyond the necessary structural reforms. Raffaella Petrini concludes: "It is an attitude based essentially on the principle of mutual dependence, which also belongs to the core of our Christian faith, that is, on the awareness that, in the course of existence, all of us, without exception, have been, are and will be active and passive subjects of care. Today, as women assume greater roles of responsibility in the public sphere, in the political-economic sphere, as well as within the Church, they participate in the effort to reconcile the moral sentiment of care with the moral sentiment of justice".
With a view to building that "social friendship" that induces us to "aim higher than ourselves and our own particular interests," as Pope Francis advocates ("Fratelli Tutti," 245).
