Month: February 2019

How much more can we take? We wore our blue armbands this past weekend to stand in solidarity with victims of sex abuse. We asked over and over for accountability, change, and redress from the Church that betrayed them, and yet, it seems daily, more and more abuse comes into the light. We protested unfair…
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I am not going to write much about the Pope’s summit now going on in the Vatican. I will remind you to wear a blue armband at Mass tonight as the Catholics Banding Together movement suggests. You will love the video they produced, especially if you’ve never seen and heard Theresa Kane’s 1979 address to…
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On a recent February Sunday at Mass, we celebrated Black History Month. Our pastor, who is Caucasian, donned colorful, African-inspired vestments. After the welcome and gathering, he went down to the aisle and called forth two of the parish’s African-American elders. A tall woman and tall man in African garb joined their hands over him…
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Did you notice this line in Josepha Madigan’s speech to We Are Church in Ireland? The full sentence is “Yes, we say to our daughters, you can be an altar girl but don’t get too ahead of yourself, you will never be a priest.” I love that Irish women who have succeeded in politics are…
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Well, to answer the question with a shaky “yes”, I often have to turn to those with thoughts much wiser than mine.  Brian Cahill on SemNet Live in February 2015 tackled the topic in Our Troubled Church and Why Some of Us Stay and helped reacquaint me with some of that wisdom. He quotes Michael…
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The irony does not escape me: On the day I’m writing this, the day after the State of the Union address, the two stories that interest me most on NPR and the BBC are about the speech and about the Pope’s acknowledgement that sisters have been sexually abused. Looking at all those Congresswomen in white…
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Here I am again – perhaps you are, too – going this way and that about the Church, about women and all genders and the Church, about…well, you know the drill. I hear the stories all the time about people, especially the young people we so desperately need, finding “church” elsewhere. This is particularly true…
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Just about a year ago I wrote a post on deacons.  Maybe the discussion begins every January. Not bad, like a liturgical anniversary or a dedicated month: Deacon Sunday, Deacon Month. Then on to other things. It was NOT in Deacon Month but in May 2016 that the leaders of the International Union of Superiors…
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