WOMEN TO ATTEND VATICAN COUNCIL

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30542, 10 September 1964, Page 2

WOMEN TO ATTEND VATICAN COUNCIL

Selected Observers Are First In 1639 Years

(N'.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

GASTEL GANDOLFO (Italy), September 9. Pope Paul said today 7 women would attend some sittings of the Vatican Ecumenical Council session starting next Monday. It will be the first time in the 1639-year history of the councils that women have been represented.

The Pope, in a surprise announcement at Castel Gandolfo, said some nuns and certain lay women representing important international organisations would attend the sittings part of the council’s third session.

The Pope, who was celebrating Mass for Italian nuns at his summer villa, said the day had come for female religious life to be put “in higher honour and greater efficiency.”

“We will take you into our confidence in this regard,” he said. The women would have the status of “auditor” observers and would attend debates dealing with subjects of special interest to women. They would also be invited to some of the assembly’s solemn religious ceremonies. Subjects on the assembly agenda include a draft decree on the role of laity in the church and a statement on marriage. Pope Paul said today: “We have given dispositions that some qualified and devout women will assist as auditors at several solemn rites and several general congregations of the forthcoming third session of the Ecumenical Council, at congregations where the questions in discussion can particularly interest the life of women. “We will thus have for the first time at an ecumenical council a few —it is obvious—i but significant and almost 1 symbolic feminine representa-

tives: first of you nuns, and then of the big Catholic women’s organisations, so that women may know how the church honours her in the dignity of her being and of her human and Christian mission.”