Top woman in Roman Curia
The Age
Thursday March 25, 2010
ROSEMARY Goldie, who was one of the few Australian Catholics who had a marked influence on the church internationally, has died at a nursing home in Randwick, Sydney. She was 94.Goldie was a Rome-based official of the church for 50 years (1952-2002), and in that time reached the highest level ever attained by a woman in the Roman Curia. She helped to organise and monitor lay apostolate gatherings and the activities of lay movements, and played a significant part in the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).She was the youngest child of Albert Goldie (originally Goldberg) and Dulcie Deamer, a New Zealand-born novelist and flamboyant character in Sydney in the 1920s. They separated when Albert left for Melbourne with another woman. Goldie was raised by her devoutly Catholic grandmother, Isabel (Mabel) Deamer.Educated at Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta, and Sydney University, where she graduated in arts, Goldie studied French literature for two years (1936-38) on a French government scholarship at the Sorbonne University in Paris. There she met and began a life-long friendship with another Australian scholarship-holder, Nancy (Ann) Taggart, who years later became former governor-general Sir John Kerr's second wife.Back home during World War II and resuming tertiary studies at Sydney University, Goldie helped to promote the work of Pax Romana, an international organisation of Catholic intellectuals. At the same time she became a member of the Grail, a Dutch-founded organisation of active Catholic lay women.Goldie was drawn back to Paris in 1945, but the preparation of a doctoral thesis was interrupted when she agreed to work for Pax Romana in Fribourg, Switzerland. She stayed there for six years, finally taking up permanent residence in Rome in October 1952.She was recruited by COPECIAL, an agency established under Pope Pius XII to prepare world congresses on the lay apostolate. With her sharp mind and retentive memory, Goldie soon became a key figure in this work, about which she occasionally briefed Australian seminarians at Propaganda Fide College. She has been described as "the Roman Curia's microchip memory on the development of the lay apostolate".Goldie made history at least twice, with her appointments in 1964 as one of the first female observers at Vatican II, and in 1967 as an under-secretary of the Pope's newly formed Council of the Laity €” the highest position ever held by a woman in the Holy See's bureaucracy. She was in the post for 10 years until it was decided a priest should have the role.Her appointment as a professor of pastoral theology at the Pontifical Lateran University was meant to compensate her for the change, but she did not hesitate to tell her old friend, Pope Paul VI, that the absence of women from the staff of the Pontifical Council of the Laity was a retrograde step.At the Lateran University, where she had given occasional lectures and been a colleague and friend of the sociologist Monsignor (later Cardinal) Pietro Pavan, she translated into English some of the work being done there on Pavan's thoughts. He had drafted Pope John XXIII's famous 1963 encyclical letter Peace on Earth (Pacem in Terris). He had also been one of the experts involved at Vatican II in preparing documents about the church in the modern world and religious freedom.Apart from her wartime activities in Australia on behalf of Pax Romana and the Grail, most of Goldie's church work had a global character. Her association with Pavan in the 1950s opened the way for her to exercise some influence on church events in her own country.Pavan was one of two Roman experts appointed under Pius XII to study and report on B. A. Santamaria's anti-communist movement (which was deeply involved in Labour's split in the 1950s). Goldie shared with him some concerns about the Australian church leadership's involvement in political action undertaken by an organisation such as Santamaria's.The Holy See's adverse finding in 1957 about that agency reflected the views of Pavan and Goldie. She had helped to alert some of the Australian bishops to articles appearing in the Bombay Examiner in which Santamaria had put forward a church-state theory at odds with the current orthodoxy. He eventually abandoned that position, claiming rather implausibly that his paper had been merely a discussion-starter.Goldie was close to most of the six popes under whom she served. With views on the Catholic laity's role and on socio-political matters that are close to those of thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Joseph Cardijn, Charles Peguy, John Courtney Murray and Pavan, she adhered to a moderate brand of liberalism.Her Requiem Mass in the chapel of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Randwick was attended by three Australian cardinals, the papal nuncio to Australia, several other bishops, relations and friends. It was both a personal and an official recognition of the contribution of a gifted and humble woman.Sixty years after the death of Mabel Deamer, Rosemary shares a grave in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs Cemetery with her loving grandmother.Dr Michael Costigan, who first met Rosemary Goldie in Rome nearly 60 years ago, is an adjunct professor at the Australian Catholic University.ROSEMARY GOLDIECATHOLIC LAITY CHAMPION1-2-1916 €” 27-2-2010By MICHAEL COSTIGAN
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