Category: Preaching Equality

I have attended Catholics schools for the entirety of my life, from preschool through college, where I am now. My experience has always been what I would describe as pleasant, and I am grateful for the moral foundations I received, and particularly the lifelong friendships I was able to cultivate. Some of my favorite memories…
Read more

After a month of looking at issues of oppression that we can use our priesthood to address, I am delighted to find important articles on ordination.  In La Croix International, George Wilson presents a deceptively simple analysis of the situation. He begins slowly: it’s a “policy” to exclude a “class” of people based on “gender.”…
Read more

In Birth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church, Olga M. Segura documents how Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi “created a decentralized community of activists who stand in solidarity with the rallying cry, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and center the lived experiences of society’s most vulnerable, Black transgender and queer women…
Read more

We will be doing some dramatic gathering together, especially this month. The obvious, what I call “dramatic” gathering, will be for the Thanksgiving feast. The other major coming together will be to fulfill the request of the Pope to gather as a community to begin to dialogue about what we envision as a “synodal” new…
Read more

Last week Regina Bannan wrote not only about Black Catholic History, but called us to action by remembering that “[L]ike all history, Black Catholic History is being made today as well, and the history of earlier eras has been communicated with new urgency in the last year.” Regina’s post and the work of Black Catholic scholars…
Read more

Alert: shifting from Bishops and Vatican! From Synods and Communion! Commemorative weeks exist to remind us to think beyond our immediate concerns, and I will do that this week, relying first on historian Shannen Dee Williams of Villanova University, who has done so much to recover the story of American Catholic sisters. What stands out…
Read more

I thought October 3, the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, should have been renamed Misogynistic Sunday, the 27th Sunday of “Extraordinary” Time. What a choice of readings! I was transported back to childhood listening to fairy tales, surely not written nor inspired by God, but by men. “Once upon a time” we had listened, so…
Read more

You know what it’s like when you return from vacation: a huge pile of mail. One magazine cover leapt out to me: “Prayer and Power,” with a photo of Paula Clark, “the first Black and first Episcopal Bishop of Chicago, on building a truly inclusive ministry.” My welcome home! I am always thrilled when our…
Read more

What is going on at Commonweal? I am so shocked by Adam Fleming Petty’s introduction to a book review that I am inspired to violate the gender norms of “the nineties,” though of which century I am not sure. Was it really true that “A man undergoing a midlife crisis buys a sports car” in…
Read more

I belong to a small faith group (small in numbers, hopefully not in faith!) whose recent discussion topic was: How do we live with uncertainty. Easily, I ventured, especially compared to living with its opposite which I have always found infinitely more difficult. Really, I wondered, how do we possibly manage to live with the…
Read more