On September 19 of this year, the longest and most comprehensive interview with the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, Francis, was published. In an instant, the contents of the interview were published in newspapers, magazines, internet news, and even printed in a brochure.
On September 24, in connection with the published interview, the editorial board of the magazine “America” posted the following comment on its website: – Due to an error in the earlier version of the interview, the following sentence was not legible: “It is important to broaden the opportunities for a greater presence of women in the church.”
Did the team of translators and editors mishear? Or did they deliberately suppress what the Pope said about the question of women in the church?
The editor-in-chief of the magazine “America,” the priest Matt Malone, explained the situation as an entirely accidental error and apologized for what had happened.
The first to notice this omission in the interview was Phyllis Zagano, a representative of the National Catholic Reporter. Zagano added that perhaps a woman should also have been invited to this interview project after all, since no women had taken part in it.
It seems ironic that the longest and most comprehensive interview the Pope had ever given to the press omitted only one sentence. Moreover, this sentence, as it turned out, speaks about women in church structures and about broadening women’s opportunities within them. It is a significant sentence precisely because, throughout the entire existence of the Roman Catholic Church, this exclusive opportunity to be present in church structures at all levels was a male domain only.
If the “accidental” error was deliberate, that is sad. But it is even sadder if the omission of the sentence was unintentional, namely, that no representative of the interview team, in this case a man, was able to hear the Pope’s words about women.
Resources:
http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview (accessed 03.10.2013)
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/224390/america-magazine-corrects-pope-francis-interview/ (accessed 04.10.2013)
Women’s Studies course, KU Leuven (03.10.2013)
Aļesja Lavrinoviča