"Nature is not 'mere' property to be owned and exploited."

Almost 40 years of conflict in the province, with an even longer historical build-up, could be expected to have marked people and communities deeply. A research question had been circulated before our meeting: Were women torn between the expectations of their local churches and those of the paramilitaries within their own communities?

GSR Today - Farmers in Peru win against big copper, for now; immigration policy in the U.S. is still murky; and others are picking up on Sr. Simone Campbell's call for public policy, including taxation, to be guided by beliefs.

The House for Men and a House for Families at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago’s Hyde Park opened May 1, 2014. Each is now home to about a dozen people either waiting for final permission to stay in the United States or who do have permission and are learning how to live here – getting training or going to school, finding jobs and saving money for somewhere to live. They are a ministry of Interfaith Committee for Detained Immigrants, which was formed in 2007 by two Sisters of Mercy, Sr. JoAnn Persch and Sr. Pat Murphy.

Declaring four 19th-century women religious saints, Pope Francis said they are models for all Christians of how faith, nourished in prayer, is expressed concretely in acts of charity and the promotion of unity. The new saints, proclaimed during a Mass May 17 in St. Peter's Square, included two Palestinians – Sts. Marie-Alphonsine, founder of the Rosary Sisters, and Mary of Jesus Crucified, a Melkite Carmelite – as well as French St. Jeanne Emilie de Villeneuve and Italian St. Maria Cristina Brando.

It’s been a month since the Vatican quietly ended its controversial oversight of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. With no press conference and little fanfare, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and LCWR issued a joint statement on April 16 announcing the fulfillment of the 2012 mandate for LCWR reform. And then they went silent.
Additional coverage: Q & A with Sr. Sharon Holland; LCWR evaluates end of mandate by GSR • LCWR statements about doctrinal assessment, 2009-2015 • Timeline of LCWR / CDF interactions 2008-present by NCR

“My actions are my only true belongings.”

The end of the controversial Vatican oversight of the main leadership group of U.S. Catholic sisters was not the result of a particular change in discussions between the women and church prelates but of a three-year growth of "mutual understanding and communion," the leader of the sisters' group has said.

Speaking quietly and deliberately, Dominican Sr. Diana Momeka from Iraq urged a congressional committee hearing May 13 to help the displaced Christian refugees in Iraq to "go back home." "We want nothing more than to go back to our lives; we want nothing more than to go home," Momeka, a Dominican Sister of St. Catherine of Siena of Mosul, Iraq, told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. During the hearing: "Ancient Communities Under Attack: ISIS's War on Religious Minorities," Momeka was one of four women who spoke of the urgent need to not only help and protect religious minorities but also to preserve and save religious sites.

As part of the Loretto Committee for Peace I attended the Peace & Planet people’s mobilization weekend April 24-25 and the first few days of the U.N. Review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since 1978 the Loretto Community, sisters and co-members, has formally opposed the production and use of nuclear weapons – even as deterrence. Our committee is proposing to our Loretto Assembly this summer that we call for the U.S. to unilaterally disarm all nuclear weapons.