In addition to the weekly special edition blogs happening here, part of WOC’s Black History Month observation has been a series of posts over on our Instagram (@womensordination), each featuring a Black Catholic woman whose life we think should be more widely known—part of the canon, if you will. The series was inspired by a…
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From the book Braiding Sweetgrass:  “Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations. Its favored habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives along disturbed edges.” I had been thinking of Lent, of ashes,…
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Pope Francis is serious about finding competent women to place in administrative positions. This week, it is Nathalie Becquart, a Xavière Missionary Sister, appointed as one of two  undersecretaries in the Vatican’s office for the Synod of Bishops. This is especially interesting because organizing a meeting of bishops is not usually a role assigned to…
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[Editor’s Notes:  This post is the second installation in our weekly Black History Month series, which will appear on Thursdays in February in addition to our normal Tuesday and Saturday blogs. There has been much discussion and debate around the correct use of pronouns when discussing the life, work, and personhood of Pauli Murray. Pauli’s…
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“I will commit an act of willful erasure, whittling each document and letter until only the lives of women remain…I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.” The “I” above is…
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“‘I think often about a group of bishops who, after Vatican I, left … to continue the “true doctrine” that wasn’t that of Vatican I,’ said the pontiff. ‘Today, they ordain women,’ the pope continued, adding: ‘The severest attitude, to guard the faith without the magisterium of the church, brings you to ruin.’”  Ruin? Thank you,…
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[Editor’s note: This post is the first in our weekly Black History Month series, which will appear on Thursdays in February in addition to our normal Tuesday and Saturday blogs. Check back weekly for more, and please share!] Even though Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot has been in…
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Ride the elevator to the top of the Empire State building at night; have your binoculars with you, and while others are doing the traditional looking down and out at all the human-made wonders and artificially lighted world, look up instead. Set your binocular focus to infinity if you want the best view, but even…
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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to be specific. Did their elected president, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, not anticipate that his statement would be seen as entirely inappropriate on an Inauguration Day that celebrated Catholics from the President to the Poet? What were they thinking? I always go back to my experience…
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I am sure she will be quoted often these days, Amanda Gorman, our twenty-two year old Youth Poet Laureate. I am overjoyed that she is so young and undaunted and inspired and inspiring. I shudder to think about a world in which gifts like hers might have been missed—or missing.  I believe we needed to…
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