Coordinating Committee

Sophie Rudge is from the U.K. and is currently the international coordinator of the
Associates of the Holy Child Jesus, which is a lay organisation closely associated with the religious congregation of the sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. Associates join the Society in spirit and mission, in prayer and spirituality, to share the gifts that Cornelia Connelly, the foundress, have given us. I represent the Society at Andante as well as at the National Board of Catholic Women in the U.K. I am also the Secretary of the Newman Association, which shares Saint John Henry Newman’s desire for an instructed laity. The Newman Association is a member of Pax Romana the  International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs.I have recently retired from running my own orthodontic practice, only to become more occupied than ever with childcare to my eight young grandchildren!

She is Polish, coming from a charming  city of Krakow. She is a sociologist, and graduated from Jagiellonian University. For almost 10 years she has been doing evaluation research for local and national governments. Then she moved to Latvia and now lives in a permaculture homestead in the North Eastern part of Latvia with her husband and 4 kids.
She is on the boards of several international evaluation organizations and she is a member of Latvian Catholic Women Association (LKSA). Representing progressive line of young Catholic women she admires the intergenerational cooperation in Andante Europe and shares the deep respect of the diversity of standpoints within our Alliance.

She is Belgian and has been living in the Netherlands for over 40 years. As a representative of the Netwerk Katholieke Vrouwen she is a member of the CoCoA.  Marleen is a natural teacher.  For 20 years she has been teaching detainees in the largest prison in the Netherlands as well as being a teacher at the University of Applied Sciences.  Marleen is very involved in activities in her local parish, where she is also chairman of the local development organization. Her 7 years of work as a volunteer in Rwanda (Africa) is the basis for her motivation.

Global thinking is the motto of Marleen, let’s start in Europe!

Beatrice Ledergerber has a background as elementary school teacher and did her masters in history and cultural anthropology (Univ. Zürich CH, 1997) and later in Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel CH, 2021). She spent most of her professional life developing and coordinating programs for educational (re-)integration of young adults and migrant women for the state government. Equal rights and equal opportunities were always the framework of her undertakings. Beatrice is retired and has two adult daughters and two little granddaughters. She lives with her partner Martin in Basel, Switzerland.

Irmtraud Widmayer, by education an interpreter (Spanish and English) has been heading for more than 20 years the Export Sales Team of a German industrial company. She is a member of Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund e.V. (KDFB), a German association of catholic women representing more than 130.000 members throughout Germany. The vision of KDFB is a world where strong and committed women stand out for their righths. KDFB’s core values are solidarity, modern spirituality, justice and human dignity and based on these pilars the association and its members seek to play an active role in politics, society and the catholic church. Irmtraud Widmayer lives in the south of Germany, in Baden-Württemberg; she is married and has three grown-up children.

Agnieszka Zarzyńska is ethnologist and cultural anthropologist by education, specialist in institutional development by profession. For over 7 years, she’s been working for a Catholic organisation focusing on social innovation, youth engagement and community development. She is a member of a Polish association of female Catholics, Tekla, which aims at empowering women in the Church and providing them with space to express their voices. Originally from Poland, she currently lives in Brussels with her husband.