Category: Pope Francis

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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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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Rebecca Traister has a new book that could describe us perfectly: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. We are good. Are we mad? Traister spoke this evening – Thursday – at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and I encourage you to go hear her on the book tour. I hope she has the…
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I was struck by two questions about the political process in the above article by Kai Wright in The Nation (September 24/October 1, 2018): Are we prepared to end the minority rule that white men have wielded over the United States for hundreds of years? Are we ready to tear down the foundation upon which…
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  I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury hearing, and I expect I will remember for quite some time. Twelve other young women and I had just concluded our initiation ceremony into the Loretto Volunteer Program, surrounded by the Sisters of Loretto at their Motherhouse on…
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Everybody in the church, it seems, is disgusted by clericalism and is blaming it for the sexual abuse and cover-up crisis. Think about it – if the clergy is not to be left to its own devices any more, who will act? Lay people. I’m not blaming lay Catholics for this crisis; too much deliberate…
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So much breaking news! Last week I filed this blog before the Pope’s statement, summarized well in LaCroix.  A nice statement, but, as Paul Moses notes in Commonweal, similar to what he said in 2015 when he met survivors – and Attorney General Shapiro? – in Philadelphia. This is an excellent analysis of what the…
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Pennsylvania is my home, and again a grand jury report makes the news.  I hear about it on the radio and I am sad. I watch it on TV and I cry. I read the paper and I think. “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” This shibboleth from the Nixon era is NOT true…
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I’m sure you know that in Greek mythology the Amazons were a tribe of warrior women, located in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. The name and concept persists in Europe through the Medieval and early Renaissance periods. Then it’s applied to a whole area of South America drained by a massive river system…
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