On July 28, more than 60 people, including more than half a dozen clergy members, journeyed as part of a "prayer pilgrimage for Black lives and racial equity" to three sites in southeastern Virginia where Confederate monuments stood for more than a century.
Built a few years before the start of the Civil War, St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Norfolk, Virginia, is home to a vibrant, predominantly Black community whose parishioners come from miles around.
Jesuit Fr. Jack Podsiadlo is retiring after decades of groundbreaking work in Latino ministry, first at New York's Nativity Mission Center and, more recently, at the Latino Leadership Institute in Richmond, Virginia.
By offering generous stipends and welcoming diocesan officials to vet their speakers, a parish in the "mission territory" Diocese of Richmond is bringing some big headliners to their adult faith formation program.
Though the crisis has gone global, scholar Massimo Faggioli says that one strain of it is peculiar to the United States, where it is inseparable from such hot-button issues as sexuality, homosexuality and gender.
