by Maria Louise Edwards
Contributor
For over 10 years, Felician Sisters have been present to the undocumented and homeless in Pomona, California. But recently we realized that those we met on the streets were the "success" story — migrants who had survived, versus the hundreds who die in our deserts every year.
Catholic News Service
Recent credible sexual abuse allegations in India and East Timor have underscored the fears of many in the church that clerical sex abuse is rife in South, Southeast and North Asia, which have a collective population of at least 120 million Catholics.
Emily Kahm is finishing up a fellowship at Augustana College, where she teaches a course in American Catholicism that is centered around the work of women religious. She sends her students out to interview a sister, an assignment that's generated surprising encounters.
by Barbara Kane
Contributor
We've heard about the border's "security and humanitarian crisis," but we did not see any drugs, guns or criminals. We saw parents bringing their children to the U.S. so that they could live without the fear of violence or poverty.
Sr. Maria Louise Edwards has been a Felician Sister for eight years. Graduating from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater, she has ministered as mission leader for Holy Name of Mary College School in Canada, and as assistant director of the Angela Spirituality Center in Pomona, California. She has also worked with women involved in domestic violence, and served on a team with a Catholic deliverance ministry.
When 200 girls from local Catholic high schools arrive at Philadelphia's St. John Neumann Center on Feb. 12, they'll be participating in an event that's a tiny bit of history in the making: a one-day seminar marking the first time the (mostly black) Oblate Sisters of Providence and the (mostly white) Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will collaborate on a vocations project.
The Sister Water Project is just one of dozens of sister-led efforts to bring clean drinking water to those without. But project committee member Sr. Judy Sinnwell said the venture has been as much about changing those involved as it is about changing the lives of those given fresh water. "When we set out to do this, we were thinking of what would happen out there as we met a need," Sinnwell said. "But what happened in the congregation was it impacted all of us."
by GSR Staff
GSR Today - People are gathering across the world Feb. 8 in prayer and observances of the International Day of Prayer and Awareness Against Human Trafficking.
Horizons - Although walls of selfishness can block me from being my best self, solitude is an important element in my path to communion with God.
While sisters praised Pope Francis' recent acknowledgment of the issue, they called for follow-through by establishing protocols for reporting the physical and sexual abuse of sisters and changing the underlying clerical and power structures.
