Category: Synodality

July 30th, 2022

Evaluating the Synod Process

Despite the tremendous appeal of Pope Francis’s trip to ask for forgiveness from the indigenous peoples of Canada to the media worldwide, I am going to write about the Synod Process again. If we are to effectively advocate for people of all genders to be ordained, we have to understand what is happening around the…
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July 2nd, 2022

Synod Answers

The role of women, including the “failure” to “make good use” of their contribution and their exclusion from formal ministries, was described as a “constant theme” in diocesan reports. “On the whole women were not considered a marginalised minority so much as a silenced, unrecognised majority whose gifts lie unwrapped and ignored in the parish…
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May 24th, 2022

So Worth It

Some characters are on a hunting trip in William Faulkner’s novel The Town. Tom Deignan, writing in the April 2022 issue of America, describes an unsettling encounter they have: “A noise in some shrubbery compels one character to speculate that it might only be a ‘rabbit’ or it might be ‘a bigger varmint, one with…
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April 9th, 2022

Synod Questions and Answers

The blue suit said it all. When Sr. Nathalie Becquart addressed the vast audience gathered by New Ways Ministry, she wore a blue suit. Immediately, there was no clerical barrier confronting those who might be less receptive yet who had decided to participate. When she spoke to Global Sisters Report, she was more casually dressed,…
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March 1st, 2022

What Do Young People Want from their Church? Pope Francis Listens and Responds

“A static Church is a museum church,” Pope Francis told students from Catholic universities in North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean as he and some of their student representatives conversed via YouTube on February 24 as hundreds of us listened in. When we go to a museum, he continued, we knock on a…
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January 8th, 2022

Humility

Pope Francis talked about vocations to Greek Jesuits late last year, Christopher Lamb reports. The number of Jesuits has been halved since he joined in 1958, and other orders of men and women are seeing similar declines. At least, I would add, and in the diocesan priesthood as well. Francis’s further reflections are worth thinking…
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