Category: Ministry of Irritation

CNN is not a station I normally watch except on election nights when MSNBC has a commercial. But I was intrigued when Stephen Colbert had Brooke Baldwin as a guest and she explained the special series she is hosting this fall. I knew there were many women running for office in the midterm elections, but…
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I’m still held in thrall by the “ministry of encouragement” and by the challenge to envision what a Church that includes full priesthood and leadership of women might look like. I know many have talked and written of possible visions, but I’d like to add one from a church already functioning. Of course, yes, it…
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On the Sunday after the report came out about the egregious sexual abuse perpetrated by the clergy on youth in Pennsylvania, our priest began Mass by lighting ten circles of ten candles for the victims, praying for them, and apologizing on behalf of the Church. In the days preceding that Sunday, he had sent a…
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Rebecca Traister has a new book that could describe us perfectly: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. We are good. Are we mad? Traister spoke this evening – Thursday – at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and I encourage you to go hear her on the book tour. I hope she has the…
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When I started this blog, I wrote a lot about the Bishops. I am about to do so today, and I want to explain myself. “This is what democracy looks like,” that chant at many demonstrations, echoes in my mind. We are in a power struggle to ordain women. I never object when people say,…
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From across the pond, as they say, it’s very bold of me to speculate on the meaning of the Irish referendum on #8 to make abortion legal. Probably unwise, too. But that’s never stopped me. And I have been feeling more than thinking about it all. Most interpretations focus on another radical change in a…
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The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.                                                  ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Initially I had a problem with the women’s ordination movement. Perhaps you did, too. As a child and even as a teen and young adult participating in a Catholic Mass, I never felt “less than” nor marginalized nor…
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We are there every year and will be again this Saturday, May 19 at 9:30 a.m. Twelve or more of us. Definitely a minyan.  Apostles in so many ways. Saying our Mass. Led by an ordained woman priest. Outside the Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul while an “officially ordained” ordination takes place inside. One…
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When I was in my “Protestant phase” as I call it, I attended an experimental progressive branch of a very conservative denomination, allowed only because it was supposed to bring in those, especially young, people disaffected by the traditional church and probably because it was, after all, the Sixties when many such fresh breaths were…
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Our Joan of Arc is inspiring me again this week (see March 31 post). Emma Gonzalez is quoted by Joan Walsh in The Nation: About the flurry of inadequate but promising gun-safety measures passed [into law] since Parkland, she says: “It feels like: they tried to take a giant step—and then they tripped. I’m not…
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