“So much is at stake this week (in Rome) …I hope something important comes from it.” This is what Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, said to reporters at the Foreign Press Association in Rome two days before the Vatican summit on the protection of minors in the church is scheduled to begin. But Read more
Seventeen years after the Boston Globe exposé of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, two Texas newspapers have published a similar exposé of abuse in Southern Baptist churches. Although the National Catholic Reporter had reported on sex abuse by priests since the mid-1980s, it was the Boston Globe reporting in 2002 that captured the attention Read more
Shortly before Christmas, Pope Francis declared in response to the sexual abuse crisis that “the church will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whosoever has committed such crimes.” He promised that “the church will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case.” For decades, people Read more
For 25 years the possibility of Martin Scorsese making his film version of Shusako Endo’s novel “Silence” has been a matter of conjecture: Will he? Won’t he? Can he? With the film’s release, conjecture and debate continues. For some critics, it’s a major disappointment: slow moving (at 161 minutes); minimalist action; characters that fail to Read more
Economics is too often under-estimated as a pillar of social cohesion. Southeast Asia’s growth is slowing alongside that of its biggest investor, China. And that will test a region united by a trading bloc but divided by religion, ethnicity, and forms of government. Potentially, the dangers are many. Indonesia experienced this harsh reality when it Read more
Ignatian yoga, a new entity that is drawing enthusiastic crowds to retreats and workshops across the country, sounds like a gimmick. People love yoga. People love the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. Mash the two together, and you have created a nice, marketable concept that can sweep a bundle of folks into the arms of Read more
Child sexual abuse in the United States is at epidemic levels. More than 60,000 children are reported to have been abused every year, outnumbering those killed by guns or cars. Those who survive are often left not only with physical wounds, but also with psychological wounds that may never heal. These wounds exact both a Read more
This month’s meeting in Rome, called by Pope Francis to deal with the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, may well be a failure before it even starts. The stakes for the meeting have been ratcheted up, at least for the American church, as the Pennsylvania grand jury report on clergy sex abuse has summoned Read more
Another wide-ranging and frank press conference with Pope Francis on his flight home from World Youth Day in Panama raised a number of questions for reporters—and resulted in some wildly divergent headlines. Among the confused questions: Is Pope Francis open to married priests? Is he committed to maintaining celibacy for priests? Will men who are Read more
The first time the Rev. Kelly Chatman stepped into the pulpit at Redeemer Lutheran Church 17 years ago, he looked out at his new congregation — 30, maybe 35 people at the most — and got a sinking feeling in his stomach. “I wondered if I had made a mistake,” he said recently. After 25 Read more