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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[Editors’ note: Lisa Cathelyn is a 2017 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for Women Discerning Priestly Ordination. This is the last of three in a series of reflections from our 2017 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year.] Emboldened. When I reflect on my final year at a…
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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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I am extremely grateful for the support of Women’s Ordination Conference and the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship this past year. As I struggled to complete my last year of my M.Div studies it meant a great deal to have this financial support, and to know that there are many people who are supporting me in…
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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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[Editors’ note: Sarah Holst is a 2017 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for Women Discerning Priestly Ordination. This is the first of three in a series of reflections from our 2017 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year.] There is a story in Revelations about a portent of…
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When I started writing on this blog last fall, I asked Google Alerts to let me know when anything relevant to women’s ordination or women in the Catholic Church was posted online. In the beginning, I got articles from publications I never heard of before, and most of them opposed any change in the role…
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[Editors’ note: Due to the sensitive nature of this post, the writer has requested to remain anonymous.] “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three months since my last confession.” There I sat in a dimly-lit room in the back of my church, trying to think of how exactly to phrase my…
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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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Transition periods are unpleasant, to say the least. Shifting from what came before to what is to come is often a circuitous path without visible markers. Some transitions are abrupt and bring their own difficulties, but many transitions linger with us. In these slow transitions, we break from the past without quite propelling into the…
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