Category: General

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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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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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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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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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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I’m not very good at the contemplative “time-out” in life. I’ve tried but have never been able to meditate in any frequent or ordered way. I want action, I say to myself. I want us to get out there and work for justice, march for peace, witness for inclusion and equality, not just sit around…
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“Where do you see yourself in five years?” If my 19-year-old self were to look into a crystal ball and see where I was now, she would see someone very different than the woman she was on the path to becoming. Flash back to 2013, before the Trump administration took office, before the “Me Too”…
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October 14 was a significant day for Vatican-watchers, Catholics, the long-suffering people of El Salvador, and people of all religious faiths or none who have been inspired by the life, words, courageous witness, and ultimate martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. That day, Archbishop Romero was finally formally proclaimed a saint and martyr by the Catholic…
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The question for this post is whether the image of nuns in popular culture prevents imagining women as priests. Or, is the image of priest so male that women cannot find a place in it? In our small faith community last week I was commenting on my experience of Rome a few years ago: nuns…
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First of all, I want you to support the effort by WOC to have women participants at the Synod on Youth have a vote. Does it surprise you that two lay religious congregation leaders of men will have a vote in the synod, but those of all the women will not? Sisters are laypeople, but…
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