The Vatican’s Feminist Rewrite of Sin and Satan
The Devil disappears into psychology, the Fall into patriarchy, and Catholic theology into an exchange of competing voices. The scandal of Women Church World is not that its articles constitute the Magisterium. They do not. It is that the Vatican’s own communications apparatus is providing an institutional platform for ideas which sit uneasily — and sometimes irreconcilably — beside doctrines that the Church herself requires Catholics to believe.
There is a sentence in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which ought to be placed across the cover of the July 2026 edition of Donne Chiesa Mondo — Women Church World: “We cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ.”¹ Those words expose the real gravity of what has been published. The controversy is not principally about feminism. It is not about whether women have sometimes suffered injustice within Christian societies. They have. Nor is it about whether Catholic biblical scholarship may distinguish between the literary form of Genesis and a crudely literalistic reading of every detail. It may and must. Nor does every provocative essay appearing in a Vatican publication suddenly become Catholic doctrine. It does not.
The question is considerably more fundamental. What happens to Christianity when the Devil becomes psychology; the Fall becomes an explanatory myth subsequently distorted by patriarchy; sin becomes principally a consequence of social structures; and salvation is expressed in terms of education, ethics, empathy and liberation from cultural conditioning? The answer is that the Christian economy of salvation itself begins to disappear.
That is why the July edition of Women Church World, published by L’Osservatore Romano, deserves considerably more scrutiny than the usual passing controversy surrounding an adventurous Vatican article. L’Osservatore Romano is part of the Holy See’s communications structure. The Vatican’s own history records that Donne Chiesa Mondo began in 2012 as a monthly insert in the newspaper, became a magazine in its own right in 2016 and remains attached to L’Osservatore Romano. The newspaper itself has been integrated into the Dicastery for Communication. Its current responsible director, Andrea Monda, remains the man appointed to the office by papal decision in December 2018.²
This does not mean that Pope Leo XIV personally vetted the July issue. There is no evidence that he did. It does not mean that Leo personally assents to every proposition contained within it. Nor does publication confer magisterial authority upon essays, interviews or opinion pieces. But it does mean that this is not some obscure theological blog operating beyond the institutional life of the Church. There is responsibility attached to the masthead.
The July edition is devoted to “The Devil of Women”. One might reasonably have expected a Catholic publication to begin such a subject with the revealed reality of Satan, the Fall, temptation, sin, redemption and Christ’s victory over the powers of darkness. Instead, one of its most striking contributions begins elsewhere.
Asked directly, “Who is the devil today for women?”, Italian novelist and feminist Dacia Maraini distinguishes between an earlier period in which people believed that the Devil existed outside themselves and a modern period in which, she says, it was discovered that evil “resides instead within us”. She traces women’s supposed internalisation of inferiority to “patriarchal and misogynistic education” and proposes the remedy: “only culture, education, responsibility, ethics and empathy” can break these inherited patterns and free women from the “Devil” which continues to imprison them.³
Maraini is not being presented as a Catholic theologian. That distinction matters. She does not explicitly write, “Satan does not exist,” nor does she formally declare that Jesus Christ is unnecessary. The problem is what happens to the question she was asked. “Who is the Devil?” becomes an inquiry into psychological conditioning. Captivity becomes diminished self-confidence. The enemy becomes patriarchy. Liberation becomes education, culture and empathy. Christ disappears, grace disappears, redemption disappears, the Cross disappears, and the supernatural disappears. What remains is an essentially therapeutic anthropology employing Christian vocabulary after evacuating the Christian realities to which that vocabulary refers.
No Catholic need deny that structures of sin can become embedded within cultures. No Catholic need deny that education can correct injustice or that empathy is a human virtue worth cultivating. St Thomas Aquinas himself makes a distinction which is devastating to simplistic accounts of demonic causality: not every human sin results from an immediate temptation by the Devil. Human beings possess wounded appetites and free will; they are capable of sinning without requiring a demon to whisper into every ear.⁴ Catholic doctrine is therefore infinitely more sophisticated than the caricature in which every psychological disorder or moral failure is attributed to Satan. But sophistication is not abolition.
The same St Thomas teaches explicitly that the Devil acted as the principal tempter in the Fall and that the serpent was the instrument through which the temptation of Eve was effected. He does so following St Augustine, who describes the fallen angel as using the serpent as the instrument of his deceit against mankind.⁵ This was not an invention of medieval misogyny. It is the received Catholic interpretation of Revelation. The Catechism states that behind the disobedience of the first parents “lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God,” and that Scripture and Tradition recognise in that being “a fallen angel, called ‘Satan’ or the ‘devil’.”¹ There is no ambiguity.
Yet ambiguity becomes more pronounced in Marinella Perroni’s contribution, strikingly entitled The serpent, the woman and the fruit. And what about Satan? Beneath it appears the subtitle: “It is not in Genesis. The origins of a misunderstanding.”⁶ At one level Perroni makes a perfectly defensible exegetical observation. The Hebrew text of Genesis 3 speaks of the serpent. It does not at that point employ the later designation “Satan”. Revelation is progressive, and Catholic scholarship need have no anxiety in saying so. But the article moves considerably beyond that observation.
Eden becomes “the primordial metaphor for life itself”. The subsequent Christian identification of serpent, woman and fruit with Devil, women and sin is presented as the development of an interpretative burden, at the centre of which Perroni locates “a patriarchal understanding of sexual difference”.⁶ Once again it is necessary to distinguish legitimate criticism from theological reconstruction. Christians have sometimes spoken about Eve in ways which unjustly placed the burden of the Fall principally upon women. Such rhetoric is not required by Catholic doctrine. St Paul’s developed theology of original sin does precisely the opposite: “By one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death.” Catholic tradition speaks of the sin of Adam, not an inherited female guilt.
St Thomas makes the point still more emphatically. In considering the transmission of original sin, he explicitly argues that if Eve alone had sinned while Adam had remained innocent, their descendants would not have contracted original sin in the manner Catholic theology understands its propagation.⁷ Whatever difficulties modern readers may find in the biological assumptions underlying his account, the theological point is unmistakable: the scholastic tradition cannot honestly be characterised as teaching that mankind inherits original sin because Eve was a woman. The patriarchal-repression thesis therefore cannot explain away the Catholic doctrine.
Nor can the Devil be removed from Genesis merely because the Hebrew noun satan is absent from its third chapter. Scripture interprets Scripture. The Book of Wisdom declares that “by the envy of the devil, death came into the world”. The Apocalypse identifies “that old serpent” as “the devil and Satan”. The New Testament repeatedly treats Satan not as the personification of deficient self-esteem but as a personal spiritual adversary. Our Lord is tempted by him, speaks of his kingdom, casts out his servants and announces his defeat.
St Augustine consequently sees no contradiction between the serpent of Genesis and the Devil operating through it. St Thomas receives the same interpretation. The Church receives it. The Catechism teaches it. This is development of doctrine in its genuine sense: later Revelation discloses more explicitly the reality already present within the earlier text. It is not legitimate development to use the earlier text to cancel what Revelation subsequently makes clear.
And here we reach the doctrinal fault-line which makes this controversy infinitely more serious than an argument about biblical literary criticism. The Fall is inseparable from Redemption. The Council of Trent defined that Adam’s transgression did not injure Adam alone but affected his descendants; that original sin is propagated throughout mankind; and, crucially, that this condition cannot be removed “by the powers of human nature” or by any remedy other than the merit of “the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ”.⁸
Consider how directly that doctrine confronts the intellectual atmosphere of the July issue. Trent teaches that human nature cannot provide its own remedy; the therapeutic account proposes culture, education, responsibility, ethics and empathy. Trent teaches that mankind requires the merits of Jesus Christ; the therapeutic account speaks instead of liberation from inherited social and psychological conditioning. Trent teaches that the Fall places man in need of supernatural redemption; the revisionist tendency progressively explains the human predicament through structures of power, gender and interpretation.
This is precisely why the Catechism warns that one cannot tamper with original sin without undermining Christ. Original sin and Redemption are theological correlatives. If mankind’s fundamental predicament is chiefly inadequate education, then mankind principally requires better education. If mankind’s fundamental predicament is patriarchal culture, then mankind principally requires cultural reconstruction. If mankind’s fundamental predicament is psychological conditioning, then mankind principally requires therapy. But if mankind is a fallen race, wounded by original sin, alienated from supernatural life and incapable of restoring itself to friendship with God, then mankind requires a Redeemer. And that Redeemer is Jesus Christ.
Christianity certainly has social consequences. It certainly transforms cultures. It certainly commands justice. But Christ did not become incarnate merely to improve society’s attitudes. “Thou shalt call his name JESUS,” the angel told St Joseph, “for he shall save his people from their sins.” Remove sin as an objective supernatural catastrophe and the Incarnation itself slowly changes meaning. Calvary ceases to be the Sacrifice by which the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world and becomes instead a paradigmatic act of solidarity with victims. Baptism ceases to be regeneration and becomes initiation into community. Grace ceases to heal and elevate fallen nature and becomes a religious synonym for human flourishing. Salvation becomes social emancipation. That is not a minor adjustment in theological vocabulary. It is another religion.
The problem extends beyond demonology and original sin. Ritanna Armeni, writing in the same publication, observes that although Genesis affirms the equal dignity of man and woman, Eve’s formation from Adam’s rib has historically been interpreted as evidence of female derivation and subordination.⁹ Here the criticism requires greater discrimination. There have unquestionably been interpretations which treated woman as ontologically inferior to man. Catholic doctrine does not require them.
Indeed, Genesis itself destroys them. Adam’s cry — “This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” — proclaims identity of human nature. Woman is not another order of creature. She shares the same human dignity because both male and female are created by God in His image. Yet the answer to a distorted reading of Genesis is not suspicion of Genesis.
Nor does Christianity require modern feminism in order to discover the dignity of woman. Christianity possesses the Blessed Virgin Mary. The New Eve does not abolish sexual difference. She reveals what creaturely freedom looks like when perfected by grace. The woman through whose fiat the Word became flesh does not require rescue from Christian anthropology. She is its highest created exemplar.
There is therefore something profoundly impoverished about treating the Christian tradition principally as a historical structure from which women must emancipate themselves. The same tradition venerates Our Lady above every angel and saint, honours women as martyrs, Doctors, mystics and founders, and places at the centre of human history a Woman and her Divine Son.
The July issue then moves from anthropology into ecclesiology. Writing about theologians and the decision-making processes of the Church, Rafael Luciani argues that the understanding of faith develops through interaction between the People of God, pastors and theologians. The relationship, he says, is neither “linear” nor “hierarchically closed”. Within this space converge the experience of the faithful, the sensus fidei, academic research, the human and social sciences, the Magisterium and the signs of the times. Theology, he insists, is not simply commentary upon the Magisterium.¹⁰
Some of this, properly understood, is entirely Catholic. Theology is not photocopying. St Augustine was not merely a compiler of ecclesiastical pronouncements. St Thomas was not a secretary arranging papal texts into categories. The Fathers and Doctors reasoned, disputed, synthesised, investigated and deepened the Church’s understanding of revealed truth. The Magisterium itself does not manufacture Revelation.
But neither is it merely one voice among several. The Second Vatican Council itself teaches that “the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church”. The Magisterium is not above the Word of God; it serves it. But its authority to judge authentically what belongs to that deposit is not shared equivalently with sociology departments, personal experience or academic fashion.¹¹ The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith expressed the theologian’s vocation with equal clarity in Donum Veritatis: theology seeks an ever deeper understanding of the Word of God in communion with the Magisterium.¹² That final qualification changes everything.
The sensus fidei is not a referendum. The “signs of the times” are not a supplementary source of Revelation. Human sciences can illuminate human circumstances but cannot overturn revealed anthropology. Experience may generate questions but cannot determine doctrine. Theology may investigate the Faith but cannot sit in judgement upon the deposit of Faith as though Revelation were provisional material awaiting ratification by contemporary scholarship. And the Magisterium is not one participant among several whose conclusions must be negotiated into a synodal compromise.
Christ entrusted a teaching office to His Church. That matters particularly because the July issue demonstrates exactly what happens when the hierarchy between Revelation and contemporary interpretative systems becomes blurred. The Devil becomes psychology. The Fall becomes patriarchal interpretation. Eve becomes an archetype of structural subordination. Theology becomes synodal negotiation among multiple voices. Human sciences become interpretative partners with Revelation. The supernatural is not formally denied. It is simply translated until very little of it remains.
This is the characteristic danger of much contemporary theological revisionism. Its method is rarely to stand in the pulpit and announce, “Catholic doctrine is false.” It is subtler. A doctrine is first historicised, then contextualised, then problematised, then reinterpreted, then placed in dialogue, then reframed. Eventually the traditional meaning survives principally as one historical interpretation among others. The words remain. The realities disappear. And because the vocabulary has not changed completely, everyone is assured that doctrine itself has developed.
But genuine doctrinal development preserves identity. An oak develops from an acorn because the organism remains the same living reality. An acorn does not “develop” into a fish. Satan cannot develop into patriarchy. Original sin cannot develop into inadequate education. Redemption cannot develop into psychological emancipation. The Magisterium cannot develop into one stakeholder within an ecclesiastical seminar. Such changes are not development. They are substitution.
That is why the institutional setting matters. It will not do simply to reply that L’Osservatore Romano is not the Magisterium. Nobody serious is claiming that an interview with Dacia Maraini constitutes an ex cathedra definition. The question is why a communications organ of the Holy See, carrying the prestige and institutional proximity of the Vatican, repeatedly provides a platform for arguments capable of destabilising doctrines which the Church herself has solemnly taught. The distinction between Magisterium and journalism removes an obligation of assent. It does not remove editorial responsibility.
Indeed, L’Osservatore Romano’s own description of Donne Chiesa Mondo says that the magazine explores synodal themes and papal encyclicals while offering a “key of interpretation”.¹³ That makes the theological environment it creates more, not less, significant. There is an additional irony. Only months before this issue appeared, Pope Leo XIV, speaking about Dei Verbum, reminded the faithful that Sacred Scripture has been entrusted to the Church and is guarded by her, and that through Scripture we come to know the living Word of God, Jesus Christ.¹⁴
That is the authentic Catholic movement: Scripture, received within the Church, leads to Christ. The July issue repeatedly risks moving in the opposite direction: Scripture is passed through contemporary ideological categories until its supernatural referents become increasingly difficult to discern.
The problem, therefore, is not that Rome has suddenly issued a new dogma denying Satan. It has not. The problem is that Rome’s communications machinery increasingly appears comfortable publishing arguments against which Rome’s own doctrinal tradition provides the answer. Rome publishes against Rome. And Catholics are entitled to find that scandalous.
For decades the faithful have been told that traditional Catholic expressions must be handled with extraordinary sensitivity lest they communicate the wrong theology. Ancient liturgical forms are restricted because of alleged ecclesiological implications. Traditional devotional language is revised lest it be misunderstood. Patristic formulations are contextualised. Scholastic categories are treated as historically conditioned. Older moral language is regarded as pastorally dangerous.
Yet apparently the same caution need not operate when the personal Devil is psychologised, original sin is placed beneath the hermeneutic of patriarchy, or the Magisterium is described alongside the social sciences and the “signs of the times” within a supposedly non-hierarchically closed theological conversation. That asymmetry is becoming impossible to ignore.
The Catholic answer is not intellectual timidity. There should be rigorous biblical scholarship. There should be serious theological debate. There should be historical examination of how Christians have sometimes mistreated women. There should be engagement with psychology, sociology, medicine, philosophy and every genuine human science. Truth has nothing to fear from truth.
But Catholic theology begins with something which no secular discipline can provide: Revelation. The Church receives before she constructs. She hears before she speaks. She guards what has been entrusted to her before she asks how it should be communicated to the present age. And what she has received is not an endlessly negotiable collection of religious symbols.
There is a real God. There are real angels and real fallen angels. There is a real Devil. There was a real Fall, however figurative the literary language by which Genesis conveys it. There is real original sin, real grace, a real Redemption, a real Cross and a real Resurrection. And there is one Saviour.
The Church does not save mankind through better public policy. Feminist consciousness does not save mankind. Education does not save mankind. Psychology does not save mankind. Empathy does not save mankind. Synodality does not save mankind. Jesus Christ saves mankind.
Culture may improve conduct. Education may correct ignorance. Psychology may heal certain wounds. Law may restrain injustice. Empathy may move the heart to compassion. But none of them can restore supernatural life to a soul dead through sin. None can conquer death. None can reconcile fallen man to God. None can crush the serpent’s head. For that we require Christ.
And this is ultimately why the July edition matters. The crisis represented in its pages is not merely a quarrel between conservatives and feminists. It is the recurring temptation to replace the supernatural drama of Christianity with an immanent drama of human emancipation.
Once that substitution occurs, everything can remain superficially Catholic. There can still be Scripture. There can still be “theology”. There can still be “sin”. There can still be “salvation”. There can even still be a “Devil”. But Scripture becomes a cultural artefact to be reconstructed, theology becomes ideological negotiation, sin becomes oppressive social conditioning, salvation becomes emancipation and the Devil becomes the darkness within ourselves. Only one Person becomes increasingly unnecessary: Jesus Christ.
That is the point at which Catholics must refuse the entire project. Not because women should be silent. Not because scholarship should cease. Not because history should go unexamined. But because there is no authentic Catholic theology which makes Christ less necessary.
There is no authentic development of doctrine which dissolves the Fall upon which the doctrine of Redemption depends. There is no authentic biblical scholarship which pits Genesis against the inspired Scriptures that subsequently reveal the serpent as Satan. There is no authentic ecclesiology in which the teaching authority established by Christ becomes one negotiable voice among many. And there is no authentic renewal of the Church which requires Catholics to become embarrassed by the supernatural Faith they received from the Apostles.
The faithful are not required to accept the theology of Women Church World. They are required to hold the Catholic Faith. If a Vatican publication obscures that Faith, the Faith does not change. If a theologian contradicts Revelation, Revelation does not yield. If an ecclesiastical institution lends prestige to error, prestige does not make error true.
The standard remains what it has always been: the deposit of Faith received from Christ, transmitted by the Apostles, guarded by the Church, expounded by the Fathers, clarified by the Doctors and authentically interpreted by the Magisterium.
And against every attempt to turn Christianity into a programme of human self-redemption stands the uncompromising judgement of Trent: man cannot be delivered from original sin by the powers of human nature or by any remedy other than the merit of the one mediator, Our Lord Jesus Christ.⁸
Rome once taught that truth with anathemas.
It should not now publish as though it were merely one interpretation among others.
¹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§389–391. The Catechism states both that Genesis 3 affirms a primeval event and that Scripture and Tradition identify the tempter as the fallen angel Satan; §389 explicitly warns that original sin cannot be altered without undermining the mystery of Christ.
² Holy See Press Office, historical account of the 160th anniversary of L’Osservatore Romano; Dicastery for Communication, history of the Vatican media; current L’Osservatore Romano contact and archive pages. The Vatican records Donne Chiesa Mondo as beginning as an insert in 2012 and becoming a magazine in 2016, and records Andrea Monda as responsible director from 18 December 2018.
³ Gloria Satta, “Il nemico invisibile dentro di sè,” interview with Dacia Maraini, Donne Chiesa Mondo, 4 July 2026. Maraini identifies the “Devil” with interiorised evil associated with patriarchal and misogynistic education and names culture, education, responsibility, ethics and empathy as the means of liberation.
⁴ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q.80.
⁵ St Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIV; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.165.
⁶ Marinella Perroni, “The serpent, the woman and the fruit. And what about Satan?”, Women Church World, 18 July 2026.
⁷ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q.81, a.5.
⁸ Council of Trent, Session V, Decree Concerning Original Sin, 17 June 1546, especially canons 1–5.
⁹ Ritanna Armeni, “The digital world must recognise Eve too,” Women Church World, 18 July 2026.
¹⁰ Rafael Luciani, “Teologhe riconosciute, ma ancora ai margini dalle decisioni,” Donne Chiesa Mondo, 4 July 2026.
¹¹ Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, especially §§10 and 23.
¹² Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis: Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, 24 May 1990, especially §6.
¹³ L’Osservatore Romano, description of Donne Chiesa Mondo.
¹⁴ Leo XIV, General Audience, 11 February 2026, catechesis on Dei Verbum.
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- Today’s Mass: October 17 St Gall, Confessor;
Saint Gall, born in Ireland in the sixth century, became a notable confessor after accompanying Saint Columban to France and later Switzerland, where he preached and converted idolaters. Despite his significant contributions, he humbly declined the position of bishop of Constance. He died in 646, leaving a lasting legacy.
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