Pope’s newspaper pushes feminist rewrite of Catholic doctrine
Scholars writing in L'Osservatore Romano's ‘Women Church World’ series recast the devil, original sin, and witch hunts as products of male oppression while defying Church teaching.
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Tue Aug 25, 2026 - 8:10 am EDT
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(LifeSiteNews) — The Pope’s newspaper has published a series reimagining historic Catholic teaching on the devil, sin, and Church history through a feminist-revisionist lens.
L’Osservatore Romano – the official newspaper of the Holy See – published a series of articles in its July 2026 women’s supplement, Women Church World, in which several scholars attempt to dismantle the Traditional doctrine on the devil and his real existence, original sin, the capital vices, and the relationship between theology and the Magisterium, applying a feminist-inspired doctrinal revisionism.
“Historically, the world can be divided into two distinct periods: one in which the devil existed outside us, taking on the concrete forms handed down by popular culture, such as the fallen angel or the cloven-hoofed goat, and another in which we came to realise that evil resides within us,” writer Dacia Maraini – presented as “one of the most authoritative voices of feminism since the 1970s” – states in her interview.
July 2026 edition of ‘Women Church World,’
with artwork by Matteo Basilé
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In an article titled The invisible enemy within, Maraini presents a radical psychological and sociological reinterpretation of the devil. She equates the “fallen angel” – a figure rooted in Church dogma on angelology – with folk superstitions like the “cloven-hoofed goat,” effectively denying the Church’s traditional teaching that Satan exists as a real, personal being.
Moreover, Maraini reframes the action of what has traditionally been called “the devil” to a mere psychological consequence of “patriarchal and misogynistic education,” which she says has led women to internalize distrust of themselves.
As a result, Maraini proposes a framework which entirely excludes the need for divine grace, the sacraments, and Christ’s Redemption, effectively promoting a neo-Pelagianconception: “Only culture, education, responsibility, ethics and empathy can break such ancient and deeply rooted patterns of conditioning, restoring women’s confidence in themselves and enabling them to free themselves from the Devil that still keeps them captive.” Salvation from evil is thus reduced to an immanent process of emancipation and cultural progress.
However, the Catholic Church has dogmatically taught the real and personal existence of the devil. This doctrine is affirmed in Sacred Scripture, by the Church Fathers, in the liturgy, and explicitly reiterated by the papal Magisterium in several key documents. In particular, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) published the Dogmatic Constitution Firmiter credimus.
There, the council defined that God created both spiritual and material creatures, and that the devil and other demons were created good by God but became evil by their own doing (Denzinger, 800).
In the article The digital world must recognise Eve too, author Ritanna Armeni argues that “the image of Eve taken from Adam’s rib” lies at the origin of “a derivative condition” and of a “female subordination” typical of patriarchal society, in which “the masculine is the universal measure of the human, and the feminine a complementary but secondary reality.” Armeni insists on the urgency of “overcoming a vision of humanity built upon the precedence of one sex over the other.”
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Traditional Catholic teaching, on the other hand, holds that men and women are equal in dignity as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, while at the same time defending the hierarchical diversity of roles within the conjugal relationship. This is taught according to an order rooted in nature for the sake of complementarity, rather than as a prejudice.
In another article, Mary Magdalene’s seven demons, historian and theologian Adriana Valerio delivered a wide critique of Western exegetical and liturgical traditions, directly attributing to Pope St. Gregory the Great responsibility for a serious theological distortion. According to the author, the centuries-old iconography and devotion surrounding the penitent St. Mary Magdalene rest on a “a series of exegetical errors and deeply rooted prejudices that have been perpetuated over the centuries.” She added that, “Even today, this persists [in] how it is preached.”
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A very similar thesis had been advanced in July by the Archdiocese of Munich, which, during a year-long initiative, portrayed St. Mary Magdalene as a victim of a historical “character assassination,” allegedly carried out by influential men in the Church, especially Pope St. Gregory the Great.
The German feminist theologian Irmgard Huber argued that male disciples struggled to accept Magdalene’s “outstanding role” and that apocryphal texts depict the apostles as jealous of her closeness to Christ. The archdiocesan campaign used this narrative to suggest that recognizing Magdalene’s supposed original status would make debates on women’s ecclesial ministries “unnecessary” and supported a move toward a more “fraternal Church.”
Valerio, writing in L’Osservatore Romano, challenges traditional Christian asceticism based on mortification of the flesh and penitence. She argues that the traditional view of Mary Magdalene “came to support the demonisation of female sexuality and sensuality, which, in order to be redeemed, were thought to require penance and mortification.”
The author reduces the action of the demons cast out by Christ to simple physical or mental pathologies, claiming that in the New Testament, demons “are entities held responsible for suffering, illnesses, or mental disorders. They do not designate vices nor, even less, dissolute life or moral deviation; they rather express hardships and maladjustments.”
This rationalistic and psychological reading strips the objective reality of demonic possession, and the spiritual liberation performed by Jesus, of its meaning.
In the article The devil of women, Lucia Capuzzi and Rita Pinci accuse the Catholic Church of an anti-female bias in its doctrines. Citing theologian and gender studies scholar Stefanie Knauss, the authors claim that “patriarchy found in [the Catholic] religion a justification for women’s inferiority and for the need to control their behaviour.” The authors also state that, “During the Middle Ages, religion and philosophy converged in the persecution of witches.”
In another article, titled Witchcraft and its double, Sandra Petrignani presents witch hunts as the result of a cultural clash and a systematic, gender-based hostility perpetrated by ecclesiastical and male social authorities. According to the author, “The women of the night were the bearers of a complex civilization, one that stood in opposition to that of the Church and of a society ruled by male power.”
From this perspective, the trials and stake-burnings involving “tens of thousands” of women were not simple judicial measures, but the outcome of a specific gender-based aversion, since the “world of the Counter-Reformation found in these women its favourite target in a sex-phobic campaign.”
However, historically speaking, witch hunts were not primarily a Catholic or “Counter‑Reformation” phenomenon, nor were they driven by systematic discrimination. The most intense persecutions occurred in Protestant regions of northern Europe (especially in Germany, Switzerland, and Scotland) where the collapse of ecclesiastical unity after the Reformation created judicial chaos and local courts acted without centralized restraint.
In contrast, the Roman Inquisition in Catholic territories generally imposed stricter evidentiary standards and executed far fewer people. Statistical studies show that the majority of the roughly 40,000–50,000 executions took place under secular or Protestant jurisdiction, not under papal authority.
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The origins of the witch craze lie less in gender hostility than in religious anxiety and social upheaval following plague, war, and the Reformation’s fragmentation of authority. Both men and women were accused – often elderly, marginalized, or simply inconvenient individuals –reflecting fears of heresy, magic, and cosmic disorder rather than a deliberate campaign against women; a misguided attempt to defend Christian society against perceived demonic threats, rather than a patriarchal plot to suppress female autonomy.
Finally, according to Marinella Perroni, the Genesis account contains neither the devil nor original sin as traditionally understood. Perroni claims the text focuses instead on the relationship between God and humanity, presenting the serpent as a deceptive creature but not as Satan, and asserting that the narrative expresses human desire to be like God rather than a doctrine of inherited guilt.
She further maintains that classical demonology and the notion of original sin are later mythological developments, and also criticizes how Christian tradition has used the story to justify supposedly misogynistic interpretations.
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