Category: Women’s Ordination

With all respect to Neil Diamond, not to mention God, what magnificent words! Easter words. In the Old Testament, it is God, in defining God’s self, who says, “I AM” or I AM THAT I AM. How did those words, along with so many others in our scriptural readings, become twisted into statements of ultimate,…
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I used to discount the stories of the saints in my Roman Catholic upbringing, but a couple of times this week I am reminded that they are not only our inheritance. New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead pulled out an image this week to write about the March for Our Lives.The silent, head-shaven Emma Gonzalez reminded…
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I’ve been struggling with trying to be inspiring. I so believe in the power and, yes, even glory of the Holy Thursday Witnesses we in Philadelphia, and perhaps you elsewhere have been doing, and I’ve been searching and searching for something to inspire more people – like you – like you with your friends –…
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It’s a bit difficult to see our faces in this photo of our 2015 annual Holy Thursday witness at the Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul in Philadelphia, but really, how menacing could we possibly look? And yet, two years in a row, people, in protest to our presence, often in our faces, have held…
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To avoid being buried alive, fairy tale author, Hans Christian Andersen, kept a note by his bed that said: “I only seem to be dead.” – from National Geographic Kids publication: Weird But True. With the above in mind, I suggest, when we feel buried alive by a smirkingly insensitive, sexist, entrenched church hierarchy, we…
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This is a quote from John Allen in Crux, who notes that every twenty years, “the Vatican has felt compelled to issue a major statement on the role of women.” Leave it up to Crux to remind us of Inter Insigniores in 1976 and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994. This time the major statement has been…
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The season of Lent can be a particularly trying time for those of us who are experiencing great sorrow. It can also be a trying time for those of us who are looking inward – and outward – to contemplate what sacrifices, what alms, what prayers we might make, give, offer up, to relieve the…
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Over two weeks ago, my beautiful daughter died, leaving a husband and three young sons. She also left this – which I send on to you: Why the Woods Family Are Still Catholic By Laura Woods It was the first funeral since my father died, a cousin removed from me by generation and distance, and…
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This past summer I took a writing course called “The Power of the Pen” focusing on using poems or plays to address a social issue about which we were passionate. You can guess which one I chose! Our first assignment was to write a short monologue that someone in history who had inspired us might…
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I am indebted to Simone Campbell for this week’s theme, courtesy of Marian Ronan. In The Georgetown Voice, the ever-revolutionary Campbell “then took audience questions, leading to a profession of her personal ‘heresy,’ her belief that women can and should be ordained. “’Ordination is an extension of baptism, and there are different kinds of baptism……
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