Rosemary Goldie was born in
Manly, New South Wales and raised by her maternal grandmother. She attended high school at
Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta, and later studied arts at the
University of Sydney. She gained a scholarship from the French government which allowed her to study at the
Sorbonne where she heard
Jacques Maritain. In 1951 she worked at the first First World Congress of the Lay Apostolate and then studied
Catholic theology at the academy of the
Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. In 1964 she was one of the first female auditors of the
Second Vatican Council.
Pope Paul VI made her undersecretary in the newly created
Pontifical Council for the Laity in 1967. When the council became a permanent part of the
Roman Curia in December 1976, Goldie took a
professorship for pastoral theology at the
Pontifical Lateran University continuing there as
tutor when she
retired from that post. In 1990, Goldie was made an Officer of the
Order of Australia for "service to religion and to international relations". Goldie served under four popes: Paul VI, who described her as "our co-worker";
John XXIII, who described her as
la piccinina ("the little one"); the short-lived
John Paul I; and
John Paul II who visited her in her Vatican office and who received a copy of her autobiography. She knew
Benedict XVI during her days in Rome and he visited her in her nursing home in 2008 on the occasion of
World Youth Day 2008. She edited, and wrote an afterword to, the biography of her mother, writer
Dulcie Deamer,
The Queen of Bohemia (1998, ) and an autobiography,
From a Roman Window (1998, ), about the time of her work for the Vatican. She also provided the English translation of ''Il Cantico dell'uomo
by Franco Biffi about Pietro Cardinal Pavan as Prophet of Our Times – The Social Thought of Cardinal Pietro Pavan'' (1992, ). Goldie died at the
Little Sisters of the Poor,
Randwick, New South Wales, on 27 February 2010, aged 94. Her mother had died there thirty years previously. In 2018, a new conference room at the Australian embassy to the Holy See was first opened; it is named for Goldie and features a picture of her. ==References==