Month: March 2019

Brexit has fascinated me since a small majority of the British population decided to leave the European Union, without knowing really what it meant or how it would happen. Do the voters want to have a do-over: to vote again, with more knowledge? BBC radio was where I first heard about the resignations of Lucetta…
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We in the Southeastern Pennsylvania division of Women’s Ordination Conference on each Holy Thursday hold a witness calling for the ordination of women. We stand in song and prayer outside the Basilica of Saints Peter & Paul in Philadelphia in all kinds of weather – rain, snow, sleet, heat – while, inside, the (Vatican-sanctioned) male…
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I am so impressed by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision not to name the gunman who killed fifty people at two mosques last week. I would like hers to become a household name — “very well-known,” as the dictionary defines it — and not only for this decision. She and her cabinet have…
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What do you think of when you hear the word, “Vatican”?  An imposing basilica dome? A white cloaked man in a funny car?  A sea of red-capped heads? A plaza of milling people and towering pillars?  As I have been finding out these past months, it’s hard to decipher just exactly what “the Vatican” or…
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Maybe too easy. The Catholic Church in the United States was for too long dominated by an Irish clergy. I would hate to replicate that in the Women’s Ordination Movement. Nonetheless, I am about to be green. After all, in our East Coast cities and maybe others this weekend, one can’t walk without dodging hordes…
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Our rules. Our rituals. The Catholic Church’s. Our society’s. Our own. How did we get so out of date. So stuck. So imprisoned. And, most importantly, how can we finally be free. I am currently reading John Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir – just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day, I suppose, although that…
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Well, it’s Lent. Is that good news or bad news? My mother always had cottage cheese for lunch and lost weight doing it. The rules have changed and I have passed the age when such virtue and/or sacrifice was necessary, anyway. But I think about it. I wind up asking about whether there’s good news…
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If you have not read Alice McDermott’s latest book, The Ninth Hour, I urge you to run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore, library, or e-book download! Beautifully written, unsentimentally poignant, compelling and affecting, it actually makes you proud to be Catholic just based on what so many nuns in the past have been doing…
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This is the insight of Margaret McLaughlin, looking at the photos of the last day of the summit on sex abuse. All those pink hats on the bishops! We are reminded, of course, of all the pink hats worn around the world as women lift their voices and hearts during the now-annual marches in January.…
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