"Religious life is not a self-selected option — it is a call to give one's entire life in love to Christ and to his prophetic mission to confront and change the oppressive and unjust structures in our world: political, economic, cultural, religious or any other."

"There are only a few of us who are in this wonderful, privileged position of being able to say, 'OK, we are looking at this as historians. We are also looking at this as insiders.' How do I tell the story of religious life as one who has lived it?" 

When Sr. Anne McCrohan said goodbye to her parents and most of her 10 siblings at a train station in County Kerry, she thought it was forever. At age 18, McCrohan had agreed to go to America to teach parochial school students.

Simply Spirit: Former Irish President Mary McAleese prophetically said that Catholic patriarchalism "acts as a powerful brake on dismantling the architecture of misogyny wherever it is found." She was speaking at the March 8 Voices of Faith event in Rome.

When Katie Spanuello Rahman recalls the campus of her alma mater St. Mary-of-the-Woods College, she paints an idyllic picture.

"It was like living in a fairy-tale setting, with a marble staircase to ascend to my room" in Le Fer Residence Hall, said the 1993 alumna. "I always took great pride in the castlelike buildings and the surrounding natural beauty of the trees and the religious shrines on campus."

Bowling with Nuns was one of many events around the country marking the fifth annual National Catholic Sisters Week, which ran from March 8 to 14. The week's purpose is to honor women religious, bring awareness of sisters in the United States to laypeople, and perhaps draw young women to join missions.

"Can we believe just a little longer? It will get darker still, but we will be drawn up and up."

We live in a world that seems to be unraveling before our eyes. But even in the midst of this collapse, there is a resurgence of grassroots efforts to make a difference. 

In a Haitian neighborhood of subsistence-farm families where people struggle to put food on the table each day, Lekòl Jezi-Mari, a primary school under the care of a Religious of Jesus and Mary, educates 576 students — some of them the first in their families to graduate from sixth grade.