'America' apologizes for omission in Francis interview

Dennis Coday
National Catholic Reporter
September 25, 2013

In its historic 12,000-word interview with Pope Francis released last week, America magazine "inadvertently" omitted a sentence from the pope's comments about the role of women in the church, the magazine's editor-in-chief said.

When Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro asked Francis, "What should be the role of women in the church?", Francis replied, "'It is necessary to broaden the opportunities for a stronger presence of women in the church." This sentence was left out of the English translation of the interview America published. The sentence appears in the original Italian article and in the French, German and Spanish translations.

The missing sentence was discovered by NCR columnist Phyllis Zagano, an expert on deacons and women's issues in the church. Zagano writes about the omission in her column, "What the pope really said," published Wednesday on NCRonline.org.

In a statement sent to NCR on Tuesday, America Editor-in-Chief Jesuit Fr. Matt Malone said, "Due to production error, one sentence in America's interview with Pope Francis was inadvertently deleted. ... America apologizes for this error, which was entirely inadvertent."

"The text will be corrected immediately in our online version of the article and a correction will be printed in the next issue of America," Malone told NCR.

Zagano wrote in her column that she believes the omission is a serious error that affected how people reading the interview in English understood what Francis said.

Francis was reacting to a question from Spadaro about church leaders who have told women, "There is no space for you in the church," Zagano told NCR in an interview Wednesday.

"Francis has turned that expression -- 'no space for you' -- around. He is saying, There is space for you here, pull up a chair," Zagano said.

"What is lost is the magnanimity of Francis welcoming women to positions of responsibility in our church," Zagano said.

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full article at National Catholic Reporter