Category: catholic news

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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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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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 How did we get so out of date.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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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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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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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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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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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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