A new Vatican outreach initiative to women hit a sour note before it even got off the ground. The sexy blonde on its Internet promo video came under such ridicule that it was quickly taken down.

But the programme is going ahead, and an inaugural meeting this week will study women’s issues in ways that are utterly new for the Holy See.

No, there is no talk of ordaining women priests.

But the working paper for the Pontifical Council of Culture’s plenary assembly on ‘Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference’ speaks about opening the Church’s doors to women so they can offer their skills “in full collaboration and integration” with men.

It denounces plastic surgery as a form of “aggression” against the female body “like a burqa made of flesh.” And it acknowledges that the Church has for centuries offered women “ideological and ancestral left-overs.”

This is dangerous territory for the all-male Catholic Church hierarchy, as even Pope Francis has faced criticism as being a bit tone deaf as far as women are concerned.

The Pontiff, a master of communication, has sincerely praised the “feminine genius”.

But he has also elicited cringes, such as when he recently welcomed female members of the Church’s most prestigious theological commission as “strawberries on the cake”.

Few people doubt the seriousness of Pope Francis’ pledge to appoint women to key Vatican decision-making jobs once his bureaucratic reform is complete.

Nor do they question his sincerity when he says: “Women can ask questions that we men just don’t get.”

But, as Vatican commentator David Gibson recently pointed out, the Pope can also sound an awful lot like the 78-year-old Argentine churchman that he is –“using analogies that sound alternately condescending and impolitic, even if well-intentioned.”

The Vatican has made progress in recent years. After having a woman head the Vatican delegation to the UN population conferences in the 1990s, there is now a laywoman in the No. 3 position at the Vatican’s justice and peace office.

Another heads up the women’s department in the Vatican office for laity. Women’s issues as a whole have gotten more ink thanks to the monthly women’s insert of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

The video is at http://www.cultura.va/content/cultura/en/plenarie/2015women/prep.html