Category: Vatican

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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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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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 recently visited Heavenly Bodies at The Met Cloisters with some friends. It was a great combination of religious art and architecture, which I appreciate, and high fashion, of which I know nothing. I love the architecture of churches, especially Catholic churches.  It could be from the traveling we did in Europe when my family…
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Few church leaders embraced Vatican II like Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, who as a young bishop attended all four conciliar sessions and returned to the U.S. with a prophetic vision for implementing the Council’s teachings. Sadly, he passed away earlier this week at age 96. Hunthausen advocated for oppressed persons everywhere. He protested nuclear weapons as…
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I have to admit that I have not read the “Theology of the Body” (TOB). During the years that John Paul II (JPII) gave these weekly addresses, 1979 to 1984, I was living my own mind-body duality: ending and starting marriages while getting a PHD in American Civilization. So I can’t answer Luis Gutierrez’s questions…
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