VATICAN CITY —Pope Francis on Tuesday assigned a Vatican office to concern itself with the role of women in the Catholic Church and their “equal dignity” — his latest effort to address longstanding complaints of women’s second-class status in the church.

Francis approved new statutes for the Vatican’s laity and family office, one of the big new departments he created as part of his reform of the Vatican bureaucracy. The original statutes made no specific mention of women.

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