A St. Catharines, Ont., priest has been chosen to represent the Anglican Church of Canada at this year’s session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
The Rev. Laura Marie Piotrowicz, rector at St. John’s Anglican Church (Port Dalhousie), in St. Catharines, will be heading to the UN headquarters in New York City next month for the 61st session of the CSW, which has worked since 1946 to promote gender equality around the world. It now meets annually.
Piotrowicz will attend as a member of the Anglican Communion Office delegation, a group of 20 delegates from across the Communion.
“I’m thrilled-this is an incredible honour,” Piotrowicz said in an interview. “And the fact that the Anglican Communion sends an intentional delegation to this-I think that speaks volumes about the importance of this as a ministry and as an expression of the gospel.”
The session, slated for March 13-24, will consist of meetings of the commission’s core group of 45 government representatives, plus many side events involving representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Anglican Communion. Representatives of NGOs will also be allowed to be present at commission meetings, and a limited number of them will be permitted to make oral statements at these meetings.
Piotrowicz says there will be opportunities for the Anglican Communion to address the commission-a prospect she finds extremely exciting.
“Can you even imagine? My head is spinning with this!” she says.
Each member of the delegation has prepared a brief outlining his or her main concerns. Piotrowicz says hers deals with issues involving Indigenous women-missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, for example-and human trafficking, among other topics.
Piotrowicz says she believes she was chosen partly for her national and international experience-she was on the board of directors of The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund for nine years, and is currently on the national executive of the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer (Canada), an international ministry that promotes “the use, understanding and discipline of prayer,” according to its website.
