This bank doesn’t have a soaring marble lobby or uniformed tellers speaking in hushed tones. This bank is a faded blanket spread beneath a mango tree where a circle of women, hardworking passion fruit farmers, sit with their feet tucked under their colorful skirts, tossing crumpled Ugandan shillings into the center. The accounting system is a well-worn ledger filled with painstakingly neat handwriting and few deposits over $2. Mabel Marunga, the treasurer, flattens each note and carefully enters it into the ledger, a separate page for each woman in the circle.

See for Yourself - On the feast of the Epiphany I didn’t play the organ for Mass anywhere, so I went to another church. My preferred side in that church just happened to be the side where the manger scene was located, eclipsing the side altar.

Several times a week, Sr. Valdete Wilemann watches scores of deported Hondurans walk down the stairs of a U.S. government airplane onto the tarmac of the international airport here. She ushers them into a church-run reception center at the far end of the runway, where the immigrants are welcomed home, offered a quick snack, and have their belts and shoelaces returned. The Scalabrini sister from Brazil has run the Center for Attention to Returned Migrants for 10 years, said she constantly fights seeing her job as routine. "I tell the Lord not to let me grow accustomed to the experience of the migrants

An interview with Cara Weidinger, 20, a student at St. John's University in New York who participated in the People's Climate March.

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love."

Pope Francis’ message to South African bishops, “Violence against women harms society,” comes at a time when Kenyan women continue to fall prey to new laws that continue to destabilize their efforts “to stand and be equally counted.” All said and done, women need to be empowered. When they are economically and socially empowered, they become a potent force for change. But change must start with the women themselves. They must fight for their own rights.

Three Stats and a Map - For decades, Mexico has been embattled in drug and crime wars that have claimed the lives of countless people. In September, Mexico became a “nation in mourning” after 43 college students went missing – and some are accusing José Luis Abarca, the mayor of the city where the students went missing, and his wife.

GSR Today - This time of year is filled with national and family rituals ushering in the New Year filled with hopes. In many parts of our world people do indeed feel doomed and hopeless about their children’s futures. Some are prisoners in their own homes as war is waged around them with no place to go if they leave. Some are imprisoned in refugee camps for life. Sisters worldwide are often bearers of hope for the suffering these circumstances.

Light streams through the ancient stained glassed windows into the silent chapel. Quiet figures steady their wavering bodies, grasping the familiar chair, coming to rest in the hallowed space. Ready, ready are the pure white cloths, the corporal in its chaste folds, the cup, golden in the morning sun, the sisters in their irrevocable places. Slowly they gather, these women of the Lord.