The Nun in the World symposium - Religious life needs to be put in its proper historic context, said Congregation of Jesus Sr. Gemma Simmonds: The huge numbers of women religious in the 1950s were a spike never before seen in the history of the church – not the baseline by which things should be measured – and religious life is much more responsive and individual since the reforms of Vatican II.

The chapel of Divine Providence Hospital in El Salvador is one of the most visited places by local and foreign pilgrims. They come wishing to learn more about Archbishop Oscar Romero, the controversial archbishop who has become a Salvadoran icon. In 1966, the Congregation of the Carmelite Missionary Sisters of St. Therese built this hospital under the leadership of Sr. Luz Isabel Cuevas Santana, a Mexican missionary who saw the need to care for cancer patients. It was in the small chapel of the hospital that on March 24, 1980, Romero was killed, shot near his heart, just as he prepared to consecrate the host.

In the coming weeks, Pope Francis will release his new encyclical on the environment. Bloggers and pundits alike have been speculating on what exactly the pope will say, while social justice advocates are almost dancing in the streets, exuberant that the highest ranking official of the church is taking Catholic social teaching seriously.  

Sr. Helen Prejean, the death penalty abolition advocate, told a jury May 11 that convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev expressed remorse in discussions with her. Prejean, the Sister of Saint Joseph of Medaille and author of, Dead Man Walking, said during the defense's portion of the sentencing phase of Tsarnaev's trial that she had met with him five times since March.

May 8 a divided 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the sabotage convictions of three Plowshares protestors, one of them a nun in her mid-80s, Sr. Megan Rice, and remanded the case to a lower court. The three-judge panel upheld one conviction against the trio on a charge of depredation of property.

A plethora of conferences about women have popped up all over Rome in the last three months. The Vatican's former hard-line freeze on discussing women's roles may at last be thawing out. The Pontifical Council for Culture's controversial February event, "Women's Cultures: Equality and Difference," was the first to break the ice. A month later, Voices of Faith hosted a searingly honest discussion by female theologians and activists from inside Vatican walls.

GSR Today - Even at a symposium studying the effect of the Second Vatican Council on women religious, it is difficult to overstate the effect the council had. Fifty years later, Catholics are still discovering – and often arguing over – those effects, how the council documents should be interpreted and what the whole business means.

"The shift from charity to development to a rights-based approach has been an unfolding restoration of the lost dignity and humanity of people."

The role of women religious in the Catholic church continues to vex not only sisters themselves but the scholars who study them. Friday, Notre Dame Sr. Mary Ann Foley told the audience at an international symposium on Catholic sisters that Pope Francis said: “The distinctive sign of women religious is prophecy” – or the ability to scrutinize current events and discern God’s call to answer them.

I had been living in Belize for only three months and had known Teresa for only two when I got the phone call: Her oldest son was in the hospital, and could I please come right away to be with them? I hopped on my bike and with some trepidation pedaled toward the hospital I had managed to avoid visiting until now: the understaffed and overcrowded public hospital which had the reputation (probably exaggerated) of turning out as many people dead as alive.