Faith in Focus

I decided while Iwas living with nuns that I wanted to be a priest. I live with two of them, Pat and Ellenrita, and a fellow my own age, Mark, who’s also serving a Dominican Volunteer year in the Bronx. The nuns are pretty easy to live with, once you learn to clean up the shower, make sure nob

We knew it was coming. Months before the recent release of the report of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy, my fellow seminarians and I were forewarned on two separate occasions that the findings would be disturbing. We were told tha

"We are going to have a French teacher!" I grabbed Rui Yins arm excitedly and whispered as I sat down. It was her turn to wait and fight for the few precious library seats. She was sturdily built and could usually push through the crowd of students waiting for the library door to open at 7

Some of the priests identified as abusers, staring out from the pages of the local newspapers, are not strangers to me. I was on the faculty of the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, N.Y., from 1965 through 1979. I taught Scripture all those years and was rector for the last six. I

Several years ago my husband, Jim, and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary in San Francisco. It was a vacation to remember, but not because of the sights. I went home with much more than I came with. It began one morning after leaving a bookstore in Union Square. We saw a bearded old man sitt

The Amish are a unique phenomenon in American and Christian culture. During a summer vacation when I was 17, I had the rare opportunity to experience the life of these people in an intimate way. Side by side with a young family of eight Old Order Amish, I milked cows, tilled fields, bailed hay and h