Hermine Speier (1898 to 1989)

In 1934, Hermine Speier became the first female employee in the Vatican in the modern sense of employee with a salary and a pension plan. She wasn’t a nun, and more surprisingly, she wasn’t even Catholic.
 

Hermine Speier in the Palazzo Apostolico

If you are looking for a job in the Vatican today, and we are talking any job, there are severe restrictions as to who is eligible to get such a job. The Vatican makes no bone about it: Equal opportunities are a myth and they don’t join the game of make believe all other governments are embroiled in. If you want to join the Swiss Guard, you have to be Catholic, a Swiss national, and a member of the Swiss army; oh, and unmarried. For any other job, you have to be a Catholic.

But in 1934 when Hermine Speier was hired by the Vatican Museums, the situation was different. There was no talk equal opportunity then, but there was a need. Hermine Speier had just been sacked by the German Archaeological Institute in Rome for being a Jew. With recommendation from her (German) boss Ludwig Curtius, she applied to the Vatican Museums for a job. There was no job; and the mere idea of a woman working for the Vatican sent shock waves through the establishment.

Pope Pius XI was unimpressed by his establishment and created a job for her breaking with every known convention on the way to doing so. She was employed as curator of the museum’s photographic archive on a pay per day basis, an arrangement that was later changed to a full contract. Her former boss Ludwig Curtius was sacked as director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome in 1937 for his refusal to embrace Nazi doctrine.

When the Nazis started to round up Jews in Rome in 1943, Speier was moved to the nunnery of St. Priscilla together with other Jewish families. The nunnery was chosen on purpose for having a back entrance that led directly into the catacombs of Rome. This honeycomb of tunnels under ancient Rome had been used for the same purposes by the Christians under persecution by the Roman Empire. It allowed the nuns to remove anyone within minutes in case of a possible search by the Gestapo.

After the war, Hermine staid on with the Vatican Museums until 1967; she also converted to Catholicism. For having done so without duress, she was shunned by her family until her death. At her funeral, all family members with the exception of one forgiving brother were absent. Bigotry, it seems, is not an exclusively Christian attribute.

Hermine Speier was born in 1898 in Frankfurt on the Main; she studied German language, history, and philosophy in Giessen and then transferred to Heidelberg to finish off in archaeology under the tutelage of Ludwig Curtius. She worked as assistant to Bernhard Schweitzer at Konigsberg University until she followed Curtius to the German Archaeological Institute in Rome where she was curator for the photographic archives. This job like the later one in the Vatican hadn’t existed before.

During her tenure in the Vatican she published four major works dealing in archaeology and edited several more. She left her mark on the archaeological community in Rome with it traces in the writings of many other authors of both factual and fictional works in several languages. She retired at the age of 70 from her post in the Vatican and died in 1989 in Montreux, Switzerland. She is buried in the German Cemetery in Rome (Campo Santo Teutonico).

Further reading
How Many Monarchies Exist in Europe?
The Elect Circle of Elected Monarchs on Europe's Thrones
The Life of Irmingard Princess of Bavaria