Month: December 2018

Staying ‘because it’s our church, too’ had come to feel like complicity by another name. And even staying for the Eucharist made me wonder at what point I had to stop letting the hierarchy use the real presence to excuse the inexcusable. Does Jesus ever feel like he’s being held hostage? (Melinda Henneberger’s “Why I…
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IN THIS HOLY SEASON                IN HER HOLY VOICE       WHAT WOULD MARY SAY?     WHAT WOULD MARY DO?                                  

Publicity surrounding the Synod on Youth and Vocational Discernment this past October highlighted the very slight role that laity have in decision-making in the Church and the growing awareness that change is sorely needed. As part of the reaction, Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, wrote an article in Commonweal…
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Sometimes it’s just better to be simple, to state the obvious, in this week before the celebration of the birth of Christ:  We all remember and rejoice that, within her self on that great birth day, Mary literally transubstantiated bread and wine into body and blood to create her son – many believe – the…
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This is my last column this year, so I am reflecting on what 2018 means to the politics of women in the Catholic church, which I have made my “beat” on this blog. It will be idiosyncratic, the first definition of which is “quirky.” Yep, that’s me. The 101 women who will be serving in…
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Recently, on a visit to Texas, I attended a traditional Catholic Church. It was large and unpretentiously beautiful. The congregation was extremely diverse: young, old, singles, couples, and lots of families of Asian, Hispanic, African-American as well as European-American origin. People were welcoming and seemed happy to be there. The Mass itself was conservative, with…
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Sex abuse. I have the image of everybody adjusting the focus of his or her own camera to see more clearly a solution to one aspect of the crisis: bishops who abuse or cover up. At the end of the USCCB meeting, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago proposed that metropolitans (archbishops with rarely-used authority over…
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I have John Marchese of the Quixote Center to thank for these words of introduction and closing, and the incomparable Nikki Giovanni for the poem. “Silence sometimes offers a window into the truth of the world around us – who and what can be heard and who or what is being silenced or oppressed,” John…
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What were you thinking about last Sunday, the feast of Christ the King? It is hard to get that Palm Sunday earworm out of my head, but our celebrant Joe Sannino introduced a new concept: Christ the friend. You may know that I belong to a small faith community, now an intentional Eucharistic community after…
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