GOVERNANCE AND ITS LIMITS: Sr Raffaella Petrini, Lay Administration, and the Growing Confusion of Ecclesial Authority
The appointment of Reverend Sister Raffaella Petrini, F.S.E., as President of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City and President of the Governorate of the State of Vatican City marks a significant moment in the modern administrative history of the Holy See. It is unprecedented in form, but carefully delimited in substance. The office she now holds is civil, executive, and administrative. It is not sacramental, pastoral, or doctrinal.
That distinction is not incidental. It is decisive.
Much of the contemporary debate surrounding women, the laity, and authority in the Church is obscured by a persistent failure to distinguish where lay leadership is coherent with Catholic theology and where it is not. Sr Petrini’s appointment belongs squarely to the former category. Other recent developments do not.
Administrative Governance and Legitimate Lay Competence
The Vatican City State is a sovereign civil entity ordered to the service of the Apostolic See. Its governance encompasses finance, infrastructure, employment law, security, museums, public services, and regulatory oversight. None of these functions arise from the sacrament of Holy Orders. They arise from competence, formation, and experience.
Sr Petrini’s academic background in political science and organisational governance, together with her prior service as Secretary-General of the Governorate since 2021, renders her appointment intelligible on purely administrative grounds.¹ The Church has long employed lay men and women in precisely such roles, both in Rome and throughout her institutions, without theological controversy.² To insist that such offices require ordination would itself constitute a form of clericalism — one that confuses sacramental grace with managerial capacity.
Potestas Gubernandi and Its Proper Scope
Catholic theology and canon law carefully distinguish between potestas ordinis (the power of order) and potestas regiminis (the power of governance).³ While these are united in the episcopal office in the Church’s ordinary pastoral life, they are not identical, nor are they universally inseparable in every context.
Canon law explicitly permits the exercise of certain forms of governance by non-ordained persons when they do not pertain intrinsically to sacred power.⁴ The civil governance of Vatican City State clearly falls within this category. Sr Petrini does not teach doctrine, judge souls, form clergy, or exercise episcopal oversight as such. She governs a city-state.
For this reason, her appointment can be defended without equivocation.
Where the Real Problem Emerges
The difficulty arises not with civil administration, but with the simultaneous expansion of lay participation into ecclesial governance structures that directly concern the sacramental hierarchy.
The inclusion of lay men and women as voting members in the Synod of Bishops represents a far more serious ecclesiological development than any appointment within the Vatican City State.⁵ The Synod, whatever its formal description, now functions in practice as a deliberative body shaping pastoral priorities, ecclesial language, and the lived exercise of episcopal authority.
Likewise, the increasing placement of laypersons in senior roles within dicasteries that regulate clergy — priestly formation, discipline, pastoral norms, and ecclesial life — introduces a structural ambiguity unknown to the Church’s tradition. These are not merely administrative domains. They touch directly upon the governance of those who possess Holy Orders.
A Concrete Illustration: Belgium
This ambiguity is no longer theoretical. It has already manifested concretely, and controversially, in Belgium.
In the Archdiocese of Mechelen–Brussels, a laywoman — Rebecca Alsberge — was appointed as an “episcopal delegate” for the Vicariate of Brabant Wallon, despite being neither ordained nor a member of a religious institute. While not formally styled Vicar General in canonical terms, the functional reality of the role closely resembled senior episcopal governance.
Most strikingly, her name was included in Eucharistic Prayer formulations at certain Masses.⁶ This practice has no precedent in the Roman Rite and stands in direct tension with the Church’s liturgical norms, which strictly reserve the Eucharistic Prayer to the ordained priest acting in persona Christi.⁷
This is not a marginal abuse. It represents a category error.
The una cum mention of the Ordinary in the Roman Canon is not an honourific reference, nor a gesture of courtesy or collaboration. It is a theological and juridical act. In naming the bishop, the priest explicitly situates his sacrificial action within hierarchical communion — offering the Sacrifice in communion with the Ordinary who possesses the fullness of the priesthood and from whom the priest’s own faculty to act sacramentally is juridically and ontologically derived.
This act presupposes three realities simultaneously: Holy Orders, jurisdiction, and apostolic succession. A layperson — however competent, delegated, or pastorally involved — possesses none of these by sacramental ontology. The priest does not act in communion with administrators or delegates, but in communion with the bishop as bishop.
For this reason, there is no conceptual space within the Roman Rite for a layperson to be named in the una cum clause. To do so is not merely to stretch symbolism, but to redefine what ecclesial communion itself signifies. It implies, falsely, that sacramental action derives its legitimacy from functional collaboration rather than episcopal succession. The result is not inclusion, but confusion — confusion about the priesthood, the episcopate, and the Eucharist itself.
Here the distinction that renders Sr Petrini’s appointment coherent collapses entirely. This is not civil administration. It is symbolic and liturgical proximity to episcopal authority, expressed precisely at the altar, where such distinctions must be most jealously guarded.
A Dangerous Conflation
What unites these developments is a growing tendency to conflate two fundamentally different claims: first, that administrative and technical governance benefits from professional expertise and may rightly be entrusted to qualified laypersons; second, that ecclesial authority over clergy, doctrine, and sacramental life can be exercised interchangeably by ordained and non-ordained persons.
The first claim is sound. The second represents a rupture.
Documents such as Praedicate Evangelium have framed recent reforms in functional terms.⁸ Yet function alone cannot define ecclesial authority. Governance within the Church is not merely managerial. It is sacramental in origin, episcopal in structure, and theological in meaning.
Why the Petrini Appointment Must Not Be Misused
It would therefore be a serious error to treat Sr Petrini’s appointment as a precedent for broader claims about lay authority in the Church as such. It is not an argument for women’s ordination. It is not an argument for lay governance of clergy. It is not an argument for synodal parliamentarianism.
On the contrary, her appointment only remains intelligible if these distinctions are firmly maintained. Once they are blurred, even legitimate administrative reforms become ideologically weaponised.
A Line That Must Be Held
The Church does not face a choice between clericalism and secular functionalism. She faces the task of governing prudently while remaining sacramentally coherent.
Lay men and women — including religious sisters — should be entrusted with civil administration, finance, law, healthcare, education, and organisational leadership where they are competent to do so. They should not be drawn into structures that implicitly redefine episcopal authority, priestly governance, or doctrinal responsibility.
Sr Raffaella Petrini’s appointment is defensible, intelligible, and potentially fruitful precisely because it respects that boundary. The Belgian case demonstrates what happens when it is crossed. Whether the wider synodal and dicasterial trajectory of the Church will respect that same line remains not merely an open question, but an urgent one.
- Holy See Press Office, Appointment of the President of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City, 2025.
- Pius XII, Allocution to the Roman Curia, 20 February 1946.
- Codex Iuris Canonici (1983), canons 129–144.
- Ibid., canon 129 §2.
- Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, A Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission, 2023.
- Luke Coppen, “Lay ‘episcopal delegate’ named in Eucharistic Prayer in Belgium,” The Pillar, 13 December 2024.
- Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, §§78–79.
- Francis, Praedicate Evangelium, Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia, 19 March 2022.
- Missale Romanum (1962), Canon Missae, Te igitur… una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro N. et Antistite nostro N.
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