Several journalists have recently weighed in on the status of women’s religious life in recent years: Ann Carey’s Sisters in Crisis: The Tragic Unraveling of Women’s Religious Life (1997); John Fialka’s Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (2003); Cheryl L. Reed&r

A well-researched study of the negative dynamic that developed between the Catholic hierarchy and women religious in the United States in the decades following the Second Vatican Council has appeared as Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns (Doubleday), by

I have met many LAY Christians who put professional religious to shame by their dedication, their service and their heartfelt love of God. I have encountered many lifestyles that seem much more based on Gospel values than formalized vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Sometimes religious life f

The popular refrain "Everything old is new" again seems to characterize increasing segments of book publishing since the turn of the millennium. Thanks to Loyola Classics, for example, a character named Mr. Blue, a contemporary Francis-esque gallant monk without an Order has emerged from a

As Others See UsInequities in the U.S. criminal justice system were among the subjects of concern that drew criticism from the United Nations Human Rights Committee last July in Geneva. Maximum security prisons came under fire for virtually 24-hour confinement of prisoners to their cells. Also of co

Those who take an apocalyptic view of the campaign against international terrorism like to cite the historian Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a "clash of civilizations." Commentators sympathetic to this view applauded Pope Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensbur

At U.N. Holy See Cites Ideologies of ForceAddressing the 61st United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 27, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, the Vatican’s special envoy, contended that a lack of political consensus and an ideology of force undermine the cause of peace. It is not so much

In the latest of my weekly telephone conversations with a colleague who lives in France, the first question she asked was, What do you think of the pope and Islam? Rarely inclined to talk politics, she was testing me out. And my response was testing her as well. Well, I think he could have said it d

Much of the work to be done in the wake of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ new document on lay ecclesiastical ministry is on the practical and pastoral level. The National Association of Lay Ministry raised some tough questions about Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord (November 2005) when they

In the highly charged and fertile theological world out of which Vatican II was born there was widespread agreement that the Catholic Church needed to rethink itself Stale Thomistic recitations seemed out of step with emerging ways of looking at Christ the world the liturgy the role of both ord