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Italy

The Vatican’s Official Paper, Now For Him... And Her

LA POLITICA ITALIANA and ZENIT(Italy)

ROME –For the first time in its over 150-year history, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official daily newspaper, is publishing a supplement specifically for women. The four-page insert is called "Women, Church, World" and is written "by and for" Catholic women, La Politica Italiana reports.

In an interview with non-profit news agency Zenit, Lucetta Scaraffia, the editor of the supplement and a history professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, explained that women hold an important role in the daily life of the Catholic Church, whether they are nuns or laywomen. The supplement, she explained, is a necessary way to acknowledge that.

The supplement wants to open its pages to contributors from all over the world to reflect the global presence of the Catholic Church, Scaraffia says. She says women have been "deceived" by a certain type of feminism. "A majority of women," says Scaraffia, "believed those who promised happiness and freedom through sexual freedom, contraception and abortion. As if happiness, for women, was to behave like men."

The editor considers herself a feminist. She also criticizes the clergy, which she deems "traditionally misogynistic." The first female journalist of L'Osservatore Romano joined the editorial staff in 2008.

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Ideas

Yeah, Whatever: In Defense Of The Passive Aggressive

Passive aggression gets a bad rap. It was once even classified as a personality disorder. But in today's world, it can serve a distinct purpose.

Image of someone looking at an eye rolling emoji on an ipad.

A user on the platform Reddit said that he found it passive-aggressive when someone used a thumbs-up emoji in a text conversation.

Peter Praschl

BERLIN — Passive aggression is the disease of our times — even if it hasn't been listed as a personality disorder for quite some time. You can recognize passive aggressive behavior from patterns, ways of speaking, gestures and even emojis. But a mild case is no cause for concern. In fact, quite the opposite.

It’s one of those debates that seem to break out every so often on social media. A user on the platform Reddit said that he found it passive-aggressive when someone used a thumbs-up emoji in a text conversation. He received a flood of responses agreeing with him, saying it was a habit among older people who simply didn’t understand that, for millennials, a thumbs-up could be just as hurtful as a condescending “yeah whatever”.

Many media outlets immediately seized on this as proof of a lack of resilience among the younger generation. Journalists are always ready to comment on this kind of situation, especially when it allows them to write articles that pit the generations against each other while pretending to be objective.

Great — thumbs up.

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