Category: Pope Francis

At the first Roman Catholic Women Priests ordinations on the St. Lawrence River in Gananoque, Quebec, I was so happy. But when the big moment came, all the news photographers there stood up and got their pictures, totally blocking my view. I thought of the irony of it all – I had been working for…
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Why is it that only the “no” votes matter? That change can be put off because not everybody agrees? Not to decide is to decide, the mantra of Pope Francis when it comes to us. Once again, women are revealed as the third rail of the church. You’ll be executed if you touch it, so…
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Is “a difficult woman” a cliché? It’s been used in an Australian television series and a biography of Lillian Hellman, not to mention a book by Roxane Gay and an anthology about twenty-nine contemporary women. Would Lucetta Scaraffia be an Italian version? Having written about her resignation letter and now having read several articles published…
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“Blasted” is how Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press characterizes the response of the Women’s Ordination Conference to Pope Francis’s new apostolic exhortation, “Christus Vivit.” Winfield does not quote WOC’s best blast: that the Pope is “suggesting no concrete actions to further his own bishops’ call for the inclusion of women in decision-making and leadership…
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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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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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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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