This afternoon in Rome, just as this blog is published at 10 am Eastern, 185 men will vote. There are 184 bishop and priest voting members of the gathering, and one member who is a religious brother. There are 80 non-voting participants, of whom 35 are women. For most of the Oct. 6-27 event, there…
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Just when we are all settled in, safe and snug, resting, complacent even, BOOM another change? challenge? blow? comes our way…and I don’t even write about politics! We’ve had many such blows, or perhaps said more charitably – challenges, in our relationship with our Church and its unending repression of some genders over others. At…
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If you were at “Radicals and The Rule,” you may know what I am going to write about. And no, it’s not Joan Chittister’s challenge to confront “the wholly owned subsidiary of pious males” about inclusive language, for God and for people. The most trenchant comment I heard after the session was “Forty years later…
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More and more a possible path to justice for all genders, in the Church, in the world, becomes clearer to me: We must convince each other – and especially those in hierarchies and patriarchies everywhere – to act with the utmost urgency to restore, renew, and respect the endangered natural world. For as they –…
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Why not? If you’ve been following the news about the Synod on the Amazon, you know that one major topic of discussion is ordaining viri probati, married men who could celebrate the Eucharist in the scattered small settlements in this enormous region. Of course, when it comes to women, we’re one step behind. Do you…
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Stained glass windows: Who doesn’t love them? They capture the brilliance of our days; of our sunrises and sunsets; and set our ancient stories on fire, infusing them with vibrancy, energy, glory. Safe within their luminosity we can rest, for the unchanging, the reassuring, the comforting, the certainties of the past are surrounding and protecting…
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Take a short break from thinking about the synod on the Amazon to reflect on what it means that Pope Francis begins his Apostolic Letter on the Word of God with the thought that the Scriptures should open minds. Not to be confined in a narrow literalness (#9), but to be the source of the…
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“There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe…” Indra’s Net from the Rig Veda We see so much that divides and separates us. We write about those divisions weekly in these very posts.  We also delve into some remedies: giving gratitude for the gifts of women and other genders in leadership and ministry,…
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I seem to be compiling a daisy chain of blogs. “Last week I wrote about” was the way I began the last one, and the way I am going to begin today. That’s because I want to focus again on the Amazon Synod. Last week I wrote about the implications for all women of the…
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Maybe we’re too American for the Catholic Church. Maybe that’s been our problem all along.   I was reading an article about fashion, of all things, and thought about how the new, particularly American, movements in that industry might inform us in our own struggle. Apparently, some of the elder “statesmen” (author Vanessa Friedman’s word…
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