María Montserrat Alvarado, the first laywoman to head the Vatican’s communications office

The personal and spiritual life of María Montserrat Alvarado has received the heavenly call. On Sunday, November 1, the Mexican journalist was named director of Vatican communications. The appointment is no small matter: Alvarado (Mexico City, 39) will go down in history as the first laywoman to hold the post. The director has acknowledged that her rise owes much to the mentors she has had throughout her career. “They are more generous than I could deserve,” she said in October in an interview with the ultraconservative Eternal World Television Network (EWTN News), where she worked as a producer and director during the pandemic.Pope Leo XIV, chosen as Francis’s successor, appointed Alvarado in June 2026 to replace Paolo Ruffini (the first layperson to hold the post) as prefect of the Dicastery for Communication. With this appointment, the American pope has followed the path of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who since 2013 had sought to increase the number of women in the Church, especially in senior roles.Pope Leo met Alvarado in November 2025. EWTN collaborated with the Holy See on several events; one was Pope Leo’s first live dialogue with young people in Indianapolis. EWTN News was responsible for producing a video ahead of Leo’s first encyclical, according to its website.Alvarado has devoted her life to expanding the reach of Catholicism through mass media. She was born in Mexico City but grew up in Miami, Florida, in the southern United States. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Florida International University and a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University. She joined Robert Prevost’s team after serving as president and director of EWTN News since 2023.She joined the ultraconservative network in 2021 as host of the weekly current-affairs program EWTN News en profundidad (EWTN News in Depth), which she also founded. It took her two years to rise to the head of the Alabama-based television network, which produces content in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. The network’s news operations focus on mass media: television, radio, print, digital platforms, and social media.Before EWTN, Alvarado spent 14 years as vice president and executive director of Becket, a nonprofit law firm that defends religious liberty as a human right; the firm even argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The new director of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication has said in interviews that her time at Becket helped channel her faith into her professional framework. “It made me think about the importance of religious liberty, the Constitution, and the American dream.” Upon leaving the law firm seven years later, she reached the summit, becoming the first woman to hold such a high position within the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition