Mexicans participate in Vatican debate on the role of women

Several Mexican representatives are participating these days in a debate on the role of women currently, organized by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America (CAL) of the Vatican , and this Friday they will be received by Pope Francis.

They are Mercedes Casas Sánchez, president of the Caribbean and Latin American Confederation of Religious and Sisters , the consecrated Aurora Torres and María Luisa Aspe Armella, a specialist in the History of the Church in Mexico as well as a professor at several universities.

They are part of a group of 35 female personalities that were invited especially to the assembly of the CAL that addresses the theme : "Women, pillar in the building of the Church and society in Latin America."

The rest of the participants come from other countries in the region; among them are Gabriela Castellanos, director of the National Anticorruption Council of Honduras and Yamila Osorio Delgado, regional governor of Arequipa (Peru).

The assistance of these women is exceptional since the plenary assemblies of the Vatican organisms usually summon their members, who are in their immense majority bishops and cardinals. For this reason, the CAL members also attended the Mexican cardinals José Francisco Robles Ortega, archbishop of Guadalajara and Carlos Aguiar Retes, the new pastor of Mexico City.

Mexicans participate in Vatican debate on the role of women

The meeting, which takes place in the Sala Bologna of the Apostolic Palace , began on Tuesday, March 6 and will conclude this Friday, March 9, with a private audience that Pope Francis will grant to all participants.

Tonight, the Commission will offer a dinner "of friendship and homage" for all attendees to which will add another 40 Vatican workers of different levels of responsibility. "For logistical and economic reasons it has not been possible to invite the approximately 700 women who work in the Vatican, who will be symbolically represented by the participants in that dinner. This will be accompanied and animated by popular songs that highlight the figure of women, "explained the organizers.

They specified that, at various times, the Pope has stressed the importance of women for the Latin American Church and for the transmission of the faith, notwithstanding "the deep-seated situations of injustice that still suffer because of machismo in the region."

They regretted that they are abandoned as mothers who, alone, have to bear the care, support and education of the offspring, suffer "odious discrimination" in work environments or, on them, the conditions of poverty and indigence and even of any type of violence, which reaches the very many cases of femicide.

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