Category: catholic news

I’m sitting at the end of my friend’s bed in Sharjah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates (just outside its more famous sister city, Dubai). I’m on my winter break from divinity school and another friend and I have flown here to visit Bushra, one of our best friends from college. We hadn’t seen…
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I have wanted to write about seminaries for a long time, but there always seems to be something else. Then this week, NCR announced a series to answer these questions: “How are priests being formed? Who is teaching them? How are seminaries adapting to the new wave of abuse crises and condemnation of clericalism from…
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Last week, I could not cope with Pope Francis’s letter to the United States bishops as they began a weeklong retreat in Chicago. Why did he think they should pray together because of a “crisis of credibility”? To repent of the sin of disunity, as I read it. This is vastly different from repenting for…
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Publicity surrounding the Synod on Youth and Vocational Discernment this past October highlighted the very slight role that laity have in decision-making in the Church and the growing awareness that change is sorely needed. As part of the reaction, Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, wrote an article in Commonweal…
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This is my last column this year, so I am reflecting on what 2018 means to the politics of women in the Catholic church, which I have made my “beat” on this blog. It will be idiosyncratic, the first definition of which is “quirky.” Yep, that’s me. The 101 women who will be serving in…
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Sex abuse. I have the image of everybody adjusting the focus of his or her own camera to see more clearly a solution to one aspect of the crisis: bishops who abuse or cover up. At the end of the USCCB meeting, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago proposed that metropolitans (archbishops with rarely-used authority over…
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Why does religion still matter?  Why does it still have a hold on people?  Why do people stay in and with the Church in an age in which reason, secularism, and materialism have become the new enchantments? At a recent meeting of Catholics Organized for Renewal (COR) in San Antonio, Texas, Michele Dillon, Ph.D. Professor…
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In contrast to their blathering around the sex abuse crisis, the USCCB did approve “open wide our hearts: the enduring call to love. a pastoral letter against racism,” oddly titled in lower case. It’s pretty good. As a young person, I was deeply inspired by the bishops’ 1958 pastoral on the same subject. I took…
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It is hard to understand how Pope Francis can both condemn clericalism and override the American bishops’ attempt to establish a lay review board to oversee their own actions on sex abuse. Or appoint Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta to organize the world meeting on abuse prevention in February as part of a new role…
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On August 1 it was announced that Pope Francis changed the catechism of the Catholic Church to make the death penalty unacceptable. On October 27, a shooter killed eleven people worshipping in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. I have wanted to write about the death penalty since the Pope’s proclamation, but first the sex abuse crisis…
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