Rhina Guidos

Costa Rica has become a place where itinerant flows of people fleeing economic and political crises in Latin America mingle — some staying, some moving on — and women religious there have joined forces to respond.

It seemed like an apt thing for a spiritual son of St. Teresa of Ávila to say, "The history of the church has been made by you, women, and while you suffered." It still was a surprising thing for me to hear from a man at the ambo.

Church officials from a diocese in northern Costa Rica confirmed that they welcomed two women religious, members of the Dominican Sisters of the Anunciata, after they were expelled from Nicaragua in mid-April.

Comprometidos con los pobres, los migrantes, las víctimas de trata, los eternamente excluidos y con el medio ambiente. Unidos en favor de reformas en el corazón de las estructuras de la Iglesia. Profetas, serviciales, místicos o mártires. Valientes. Estas son algunas de las cualidades más importantes de quienes participan de la vida religiosa, estima Liliana Franco, presidenta de la Confederación Latinoamericana de Religiosos (CLAR). La hermana Franco es también una voz potente contra el abuso en la Iglesia católica, por eso invita a que los religiosos y las religiosas denuncien los abusos físicos, espirituales o sexuales que sufran o que puedan haber sufrido en su seno.      

Sr. Liliana Franco said that while Latin America remains a place of pain and bloodshed, it is one where the church can help the "perpetually excluded."

Sisters who advocate for immigrants call a Biden administration proposal an asylum ban that will add to the danger migrants face when they are not be allowed to seek refuge in the U.S.

GSR Today - Call it a prompting by the Holy Spirit. When I asked to go along on a trip to Ukraine, that leap into the unknown took me on a long path of meeting Catholics who are helping victims of this terrible war.

Communities of women religious have stepped in following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria Feb. 6 to help with shelter, food and other aid.

When refugees from heavily attacked eastern Ukraine arrived in the sisters' city en masse in the first few months of the war, the Basilians scrambled to offer them food, clothes and shelter at the monastery.

Organizations led by women religious in the U.S. as well as other Catholic institutions denounced those who threaten democracy and efforts that make it difficult for some U.S. citizens to vote.

Representatives from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops celebrated Mass Jan. 20 at the tomb of two Maryknoll sisters from the U.S. buried in El Salvador. Salvadoran bishops are working on a canonization cause for "martyr friends/companions," which will include the four women, as well as foreign-born priests, such as a group of Spanish-born Jesuits assassinated in 1989 and other Salvadoran Catholics slain during the country's civil war.

Members of 24 congregations of women religious from around the country and supporters gathered outside the White House on Dec. 3 to protest the continued use of Title 42, enacted in March 2020 under the Trump administration as coronavirus infections began rising in the U.S. and around the world. Immigration advocates say the rule is another pretext to keep migrants out.

A group of women looking for sons and daughters who were never heard from again after migrating to the U.S. traveled in mid- to late October throughout the country to plead for better immigration laws.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed the lawsuit to block Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's order giving troopers the ability to pull over and impound a vehicle, if needed, that is suspected of transporting migrants.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued the order after a family staying at a shelter run by Sr. Norma Pimentel's Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley went to a fast-food place after testing positive for COVID-19.

Handing out clothes, food and sometimes just providing a friendly ear, the sisters put into action one of the main missions of LCWR: "to collaboratively carry out their service of leadership to further the mission of the Gospel in today's world."

In February 2020, New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan embarked on a trip to Cuba at the invitation of the island-nation's president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, causing a sensation in Havana.

Chicago-based Catholic Extension plans to help 1,000 women religious with grants in memory of a group of sisters who died in late December of COVID-19 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin.

Eight School Sisters of Notre Dame Central Pacific Province succumbed in a little more than a week in mid-December in Wisconsin after complications from COVID-19 as the virus spread in the facility that cared for them.

Chalatenango, Bishop Oswaldo Escobar Aguilar said, means "valley of sand and water" in the area's indigenous language, "but in the 1980s, it became a valley of blood." And some of the blood spilled was that of the four U.S. Catholic women.