December 12th, 2020
When Colm Holmes talks, I listen. He’s frequently the voice of We Are Church International and a long-time organizer for women’s ordination. His request to American Catholics interested in reform: support the Synodal path in Germany! To refresh your memory, 230 bishops and lay delegates will dialogue for a few years on four main themes:…
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December 5th, 2020
Looking through the Catholic press this week, I see images of four churchwomen whose bodies were assaulted and raped before they were murdered forty years ago. Members of El Salvador’s National Guard killed Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, lay missionary Jean Donovan and Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford on Dec. 2, 1980. Pope Francis…
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November 28th, 2020
Forty-five years is longer than many of the leaders of our movement have been alive. I am so cheered by that. Kate McElwee sets the tone of the celebration in her letter inviting participation in this weekend’s events: we have been together “sometimes in the wilderness, always in hope, and with an unwavering love for…
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November 21st, 2020
Sometimes you read something that is a sharp reality check. For me this week, it is a reflection by Molly Cahill in America: “An open letter to the bishops, from a young Catholic who’s only known a church in scandal.” Could that be true? What does that do to her feelings about the church, her…
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November 14th, 2020
I suddenly realized that I haven’t written much about the rest of the world, even though I’ve tried not to write about the elections in the United States. They have absorbed my energy and my waking hours for several months. So, I will use two stories about women from foreign sources to bookend the story…
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November 7th, 2020
I am about to commit a terrible act of appropriation, which is what I do every week, if I’m honest. It feels more sensitive this week because I’m going to report on an interview on decolonization by Shannen Dee Williams and Tia Noelle Pratt, Black Catholic scholars. As part of the giant European presence in…
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October 31st, 2020
This morning I am reading for and writing this blog in an unusual silence. There is no electricity in my building, so I hear the rain on my windows from no-longer fierce hurricane Zeta and the sloshing of the traffic in the street below. No radio. No mechanical or electronic hums. Just quiet. Somehow the…
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October 24th, 2020
Reading the “News Frenzy” regarding the breaking story this week about Francis’ support of LGBTQ civil unions, I misremembered the context of this old quote. It came to mind because of Francis DeBernardo’s comment in New Ways Ministry’s response: “If the pope supports such couples, what should prevent lower-level Catholic officials from doing so?” One such…
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October 17th, 2020
Do you expect a Franciscan theologian to address toxic masculinity in an article in the National Catholic Reporter? Dan Horan did that this week, writing about President Trump’s failed responses to the corona virus pandemic, personally as well as politically. Horan notes that it was only in 2018 that the American Psychological Association issued “guidelines…
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October 10th, 2020
Of course, the central conceit of Pope Francis’s latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, is a problem. The deep meaning he attaches to “fraternity” is meant to extend the warm feeling of male bonding to all of humanity. But male bonding leaves me out and leaves me cold. What does not leave me cold is separating out…
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