Pope Leo XIV Names Salesian Nun to Lead a Vatican Dicastery — With a Cardinal as Her Deputy
Smerilli is the second woman in a month Pope Leo has placed atop a Curia office, succeeding Cardinal Michael Czerny at the dicastery behind his peace, migration, and climate agenda. Her new second-in-command is a cardinal.
Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
On Tuesday, June 30, Pope Leo XIV named Sister Alessandra Smerilli prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the Vatican office charged with the Church’s work on migration, peace, the environment, health care, and the defense of human dignity around the world.
She takes up the post on September 1.
The appointment makes history on its own. It also lands just four weeks after another one.
In early June, Leo named Montserrat Alvarado to run the Dicastery for Communication, the first woman ever to lead that office. Now a 51-year-old economist and religious sister will direct one of the most demanding departments in the Roman Curia.
When Pope Francis began handing senior Vatican posts to women, his critics waved it away as temporary symbolism. Leo has answered that skepticism by moving faster than the pope who taught him the playbook.
In May 2025, he confirmed Sister Raffaella Petrini as president of the commission that governs Vatican City State, the first woman ever to hold that job. In February, he named Sister Nina Benedikta Krapic deputy director of the Holy See Press Office. Add Alvarado in June and Smerilli at the close of the month, and two of the Curia’s most visible dicasteries will soon take their direction from women.
Smerilli’s new role carries a wrinkle that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Her second-in-command — the dicastery’s pro-prefect — is Cardinal Fabio Baggio, a Scalabrinian missionary whom Francis raised to the College of Cardinals in December 2024. A nun will give orders to a prince of the Church.
The arrangement is not entirely new. Francis built the same structure in January 2025, when he made Sister Simona Brambilla prefect of the dicastery overseeing religious orders and seated Cardinal Ángel Fernández Artime beside her as pro-prefect. Francis treated it as an experiment; under Leo it is hardening into a template.
Few offices sit closer to this pope’s heart.
Integral human development is the institutional home of the causes that have defined his first year in office: his pleas for peace in Iran and Gaza, his defense of migrants from Lampedusa to Tenerife, his warnings about a warming planet. It was also the dicastery that helped him shape Magnifica Humanitas, his landmark document on artificial intelligence and the dignity of the human person.
The man who led that work was Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit who has run the dicastery since 2022 and who turns 80 on July 18.
Last fall I wrote about Czerny’s particular closeness to Leo — one of the most senior Jesuits in the Vatican, an architect of the pope’s social-justice agenda, and the cardinal Leo has trusted to carry his voice into the world’s hardest places.
From the altar of St. Ignatius in Rome this spring, Czerny rebuked Donald Trump’s threats to “take Cuba,” answering the administration before a congregation gathered for the island.
Czerny has also become one of the most quietly compelling Catholic voices in the American press. When CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked him whether Pope Leo had grown too political, he turned the question on its head — life, he answered, is political.
Czerny and Smerilli worked side by side for years. By many accounts inside the Vatican, she was the successor he hoped would inherit the office. That she now does, with a cardinal reporting to her, is its own quiet revolution.
She was not Leo’s discovery.
Francis brought Smerilli into the dicastery in April 2020 to coordinate the economic task force of the Vatican’s COVID-19 commission, named her interim secretary the following year, and confirmed her as full secretary in 2022 — the first woman ever to hold the number-two job in a Vatican dicastery. Leo’s decision elevates a woman the previous pope had already trusted with the office’s daily governance.
Her path to Vatican power is an unusual one. An economist by training, she holds doctorates in political economy from Rome’s La Sapienza and in economics from the University of East Anglia in England. She is a full professor at the Salesians’ Auxilium faculty in Rome, and she entered religious life with the Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco in 1997.
In 2020, she helped organize the Economy of Francesco, the global movement of young economists that Francis summoned to rebuild capitalism around the poor. She has spent years insisting that the Church’s credibility rests on how it handles its money and its marginalized.
“Financial transparency is fundamental for the credibility of the Church as a missionary institution,” she has said.
Her vision of the work is captured in a line she gave OSV News last year. “Our mission is not just to bring the Church to the margins, but also to bring the margins to the center — to ensure that the voices of the peripheries are heard.”
That sentence is the key to what is unfolding in Rome. For most of the Church’s history, the center governed while the margins received. Women religious built the schools, ran the hospitals, staffed the missions, and washed the feet of the dying, then watched as men alone decided what their labor meant.
Catholic social teaching has always proclaimed the equal dignity of every person, made in the image of God; the institution has been slower to live up to its own doctrine.
Leo is closing that gap.
Ordination is not currently on the table. The change he is making runs along a different track: real authority over budgets, staff, and the moral priorities of the universal Church, placed in women’s hands. Governance in the Catholic Church has never depended on ordination. It flows from baptism, and in this case from a mandate from the pope — and Smerilli now has one.
The timing sharpens the point. On Wednesday, the Society of St. Pius X — the traditionalist movement founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — is expected to consecrate bishops without Rome’s approval, finalizing a schism fueled partly by the accusation that the Church has bent too far toward the modern world. Leo has chosen not to chase the dissenters. Naming a woman to lead one of his most forward-looking offices on the eve of their break is its own answer: the Church is moving forward, and there is no going back.
When she takes office on September 1, a Salesian sister will steer the Vatican’s response to the great human emergencies of our time — the migrant drowning in the Mediterranean, the family bombed from its home, the worker discarded by an economy that counts everything except souls.
A cardinal will answer to her.
The center of the Catholic Church is changing hands, and the people taking the reins are increasingly women who spent their lives on the peripheries the Gospel commands us to serve.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the women who have carried the Church on their backs for two thousand years and are finally being trusted to lead it — and with everyone of goodwill who believes that human dignity is not a slogan but the first principle of the Gospel.
Sister Smerilli has spent her life bringing the margins to the center. That is the whole of our mission here.
In an age governed by cruelty and contempt for the vulnerable, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to look away from the migrant, the bombed, and the poor.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda — for courage, for truth, for love made visible in the lives of people like the sister Pope Leo just placed at the heart of his Church.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the politics of cruelty — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help during this critical time:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Paid subscribers make this work possible. Your support funds my ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, my Epstein-Bannon investigation, my reporting on Pope Leo’s fight over artificial intelligence, and the weekly Sunday Scripture reflections that anchor this community in prayer.
Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
America take note. We are all equal. Stop being against women and stop being racist against other ethnic groups. What was once the most intelligent nation has stooped to being the most misogynistic, most racist, most anti-science, most anti-special needs, anti-medicine and the list goes on and on. This all makes me sad and disgusted with what’s taking place in our once great country.
Bravo Pope Leo! Raising up highly competent women to run major church departments and organizations sends a powerful message to Catholic women…and men everywhere! Hopefully you will soon take the next logical step…authorizing women to become Deacons to help fill parish spiritual and administrative roles weakened by the growing loss of priests!