Jamie L Manson's blog

Editor's note: Starting this week, Jamie Manson's column, Grace on the Margins, will be posted on Mondays.

As the battle over contraception coverage raged in our national debate last week, a small report on "PBS NewsHour" demonstrated the devastating effects that the Catholic church's ban on contraception has on poor nations.

In what could set a significant precedent, Catholic Healthcare West, "one of the nation's largest hospital systems and operator of four Bay Area hospitals, is ending its governing board's affiliation with the Catholic Church and changing its name to help the system expand," the San Jose Mercury News reports.

The system's change to a nondenominational board will create "a tremendous opportunity that will help accelerate our growth," Lloyd Dean, the president and CEO of Catholic Healthcare West, told the Mercury News.

The article also reports that "secular hospitals added to the system will be required to adhere to the 'Statement of Common Values' that apply to Catholic Healthcare West's secular hospitals."

Although the article doesn't note this, the move will also allow the hospital to provide its employees with all of the provisions included in the Affordable Healthcare Act, including access to contraception, without involvement from the hierarchy.

Of all of the reactions that I've read to the Department of Health and Human Service's refusal to change the rules on contraception coverage, I've noticed that few commentators have referred to the formal name of the government mandate the bishops are fighting.

The provision is called the Affordable Care Act. This new law is intended to ensure the just treatment of women and couples who cannot afford adequate medical treatment when it comes to contraceptives and who want to raise families in a safe, responsible manner.

"The buzz anticipating Super Bowl XLVI is already astir," writes Nancy Conway in a recent op-ed on the new site cleveland.com. "However, 11 congregations of Catholic nuns are stirring things up as well."

Conway, a leadership team member for the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph in Cleveland, explains that these women religious are members of the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan (CCRIM). The organization's mission is to "invest in certain businesses, including the lodging industry, to be in a position to affect social change where we see human suffering that needs to be stopped."

Wherever the Super Bowl is hosted, sex trafficking seems to swell with the festivities.

As reported in the Huffington Post, "An estimated 10,000 prostitutes flocked to Miami for the 2010 Super Bowl."

Is it me, or are a lot of young women kicking butt on the silver screen lately?

Today, not one, but two movies will be released that promise to deliver female lead characters with a supernatural command of martial arts and some very big guns.

The trailer to the forthcoming Haywire opens with a question: "She is our nation's most valuable weapon, so why did they betray her?"

Next, we see actress Gina Carano's character talking to a brute who is trying to coerce her into his car. After he strikes her, she retaliates with a series of sweep kicks, punches and, finally, a slap in the face with a gun that sends his teeth flying.

But that's only the beginning. What follows is a manic montage of Carano's extraordinary acts of violence against men. One is strangled, one is shot in the neck at close range, and another, after being knocked out, gets a steel storefront gate dropped across his abdomen. "You'd better run," Carano snarls at the trailer's conclusion.

They receive millions each year in state and federal aid.

They pay no taxes on their profits or on their houses of worship.

And now they want special exemptions from civil rights laws.

On Thursday, five U.S. bishops, including Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, deepened their union with right-wing religious organizations by signing an open letter titled "Marriage and Religious Freedom: Fundamental Goods that Stand or Fall Together."

The missive, which is addressed to religious leaders and "all Americans," is the latest addition to the ongoing push by conservative religious leaders to maintain what they see as their right to discriminate against committed gay and lesbian couples.

If Cardinal Francis George has proven anything over these past few weeks, it's not that he can tell the difference between white pride and gay pride.

When the cardinal attempted to make a connection between those fighting for equal rights for LGBT persons and those fighting for the right to assert the supremacy of the white race, he also demonstrated that he needs a history lesson.

Part two of a series. Read the first installment here.

In 2002, when Sisters of Mercy Margaret Farley and Eileen Hogan were assisting in the planning the first All Africa Conference: Sister to Sister (AACSS) program in Nairobi, Kenya, they could not have foreseen that, a decade later, they would be as active as ever in 13 countries throughout the continent.

There is a story floating around in small but very knowledgeable circles that Pope Benedict XVI will canonize Hildegard von Bingen at a ceremony in October 2012. Word has it that he also plans to name her a Doctor of the Church at the ceremony.

There are 33 Doctors of the Church. As of now, only three are women. (I'll save you a Google: Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena and Therese of Lisieux.)

The story came initially from Andrea Tornielli at the Vatican Insider on Dec. 16. Rome Reports also picked up the story and posted a brief video on saint-to-be.

Hildegard lived in the 12th century in what is modern-day Germany. She was a theologian, cosmologist, physician, botanist, poet, painter, composer and, last but not least, mystic. She is considered a pioneer in many of these fields.

This column is part one of a series.

After a long career in the academy, most scholars look forward to a retirement free of the demands of teaching, writing and traveling.

For Margaret Farley, life as Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University has meant deepening her commitment to confronting the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the continent of Africa.

This is part two of a two-part series. The first part can be found here.

To those who believe that change in the Roman Catholic Church can only come from within the institution, Mary Ramerman would like to offer an invitation view the work and witness of the Spiritus Christi community.

Ten years after her historic ordination, Mary Ramerman rarely makes it into the papers anymore. Watching her minister as a priest today, it may be hard to believe that she was at the center of a highly publicized, painful battle between the diocese of Rochester, N.Y., and the parish then known as Corpus Christi in the late 1990s.

In her book American Madonna: Crossing Borders with the Virgin Mary (Orbis Books, 2010), author Deirdre Cornell chronicles the three years that she, her husband and five children spent as Maryknoll Missioners in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Blending personal reflection, Marian scholarship and social justice advocacy, Cornell deepens our understanding of Mary by allowing us see her through the lens of Latin American people. As she journeys to various sites of pilgrimage in Mexico, we encounter the struggles, hopes and deep faith of those who inspire Cornell along the way. Mary Cornell discovers a universal Mother who invites us to cross the borders of cultural, economic and linguistic difference and to locate our common humanity and spiritual heritage.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Cornell about the ways in which the Latin American church opened her eyes to a new vision of Mary.

Jamie Manson: So much of your book is about pilgrimage. It's remarkable to look at how your own life's journey led you to explore the presence of Mary within Latin American culture. You credit your grandmother with starting you on the path.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy rarely utters the word transsexual or transgender. And when it does, it's only to say that transgendered persons either don't exist or are suffering from a psychiatric disorder.

Add this latest statistic to the "discrepancy between hierarchical teaching and lay conviction" file: According to a recent study by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute, a staggering 93 percent of Catholics in the United States support rights for transgendered persons.

The Public Religion Research Institute is also responsible for the study earlier this year that found that an overwhelming 74 percent of Catholics favor legal recognition for same-sex relationships, either through civil unions (31 percent) or civil marriage (43 percent).

That figure is higher than the 64 percent of all Americans, 67 percent of mainline Protestants and significantly higher than 48 percent of black Protestants and 40 percent of evangelicals.

On the evening of Friday, Nov. 4, NCR columnist Jamie L. Manson offered the opening night keynote address at the annual Call to Action national conference. The theme of the conference was “Living the Gospel of Love.” Below is the text of her speech. Read more about the address here.

I want to begin by telling a story because stories, perhaps more than any other element of faith, are vital to sustaining religious communities. Stories pass on insights; they help to give shape to religious traditions; they recall paradigmatic moments or people; they define a community; they are vehicles for revelation; even though they may be ordinary, stories can tell us a lot about the sacred.

This story, I think, does all of those things. It is a true story that happened in a place as ordinary as St. Louis and as recently as 2008. The year that stretched from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2009 was especially bizarre for the Catholic Church in the United States (and, I know there is a lot of competition for that title).

Lately there has been a lot of talk about the future of religious life in the pages of NCR.

In August, Monica Clark reported from the annual meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). Facing the challenges of aging sisters and smaller numbers of vocations, the entire conference was dedicated to contemplating what God was calling forth from these communities.

The last time Father Anthony Ruff, OSB, came to New York, he was visiting with an editor from First Things, a theologically and politically conservative journal founded by the late Richard John Neuhaus, six years ago.

Ruff recently returned to Manhattan to offer the first presentation sponsored by the newly formed New York City chapter of Call to Action. Since CTA groups are rarely allowed to meet on Roman Catholic property, Ruff gave the lecture in the common room of an Episcopal Church in Greenwich Village.

For weeks I had been reading about the protests taking place on Wall Street. But I didn’t really take notice until October 1, when nearly 15,000 protesters were marching practically over my head as I attended a wedding at a restaurant just below the Brooklyn Bridge.

Last week on the NCR Today blog, I asked whether Justice Scalia should be denied communion because of his support of the death penalty.

I put forth this question in response to a statement at Duquesne University Law School in which he said: "If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it."

The last time I wrote about Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, he had just evicted the body of Christ from the chapel of St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Now, it seems, Olmsted is targeting his blood.

It was widely reported this week that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia defended his pro-death penalty position during a speech at Duquesne University School of Law.

According to John Gehring's Bold Faith Type blog on the Faith in Public Life Web site, Scalia's lecture [link updated 9-29-11] was met with protesters who oppose the death penalty. The lecture took place just days after the controversial execution of Troy Davis.

During the speech, Scalia noted the presence of the protests, and said that he found no contradiction between his Catholic faith and his support of the death penalty. He added,

Gehring did a fine job of presenting texts from John Paul II, the Vatican's Justice and Peace office, and statements from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that clearly state the church's doctrinal opposition to the death penalty. They oppose it on the same grounds that they oppose abortion: executions are seen as an assault on the sanctity of human life. This is why, just last week, Pope Benedict XVI himself asked for Davis's life to be spared.

“I have doubts! I have such doubts!”

So lamented Sister Aloysius in the final line of the play and film Doubt. She had just learned that Father Flynn, the parish priest that she suspected to be abusing children, whom she had tried so hard to remove, had been appointed pastor of another parish with a large school.

If you’ve visited the NCR Web site recently, you may have noticed an ad for a series of conferences entitled “More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church.” This Friday, the first of four conferences kicks off at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus.

Ten years later, the images aren't any more bearable or any less surreal.

And, yet, it is likely that every Sept. 11 television tribute that will air from now until Sunday will replay, multiple times, the same horrific video recordings of the mass death and destruction that we witnessed that day in 2001.

Forty-eight hours after Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, a new documentary on Gloria Steinem aired on HBO.

The proximity of these two events juxtaposed the thriving political presence of conservative Christian women and the apparent waning of high-profile feminist leaders in our culture today.

Early this week in the Guardian, Lesley Crawley offers a comparison of the sexism she faced as an engineer and the sexism she now faces as a priest in the Church of England.

Crawley describes enduring catcalls, lewd gestures, and blatant displays of pornography by her male co-workers in the factory where she was an engineer. She writes:

Just when you thought the Roman Catholic hierarchy's relationship with women and children couldn't get grimmer, a number of U.S. bishops spent their summer continuing to undermine the health and welfare of both.

The first strike against women's health arose when Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, banned all institutions within his diocese from fundraising for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for breast cancer and supporting women who are battling the disease.

As you've been reading in NCR, Fr. Roy Bourgeois has been given his second warning to recant his support of women's ordination.

In an effort to support Fr. Roy, the Women's Ordination Conference has created an online petition. They have already collected 9,000 signatures. Their goal is to reach 10,000 signatures by tomorrow night.

In a letter to his Maryknoll brothers responding to this second warning, Fr. Roy wrote, "As you know, I am not a lone voice crying out in the wilderness for the ordination of women."

By signing the petition, we can reaffirm the truth of Fr. Roy's statement.

Click here to add your signature.

The recent bid by the Orange diocese on the Crystal Cathedral may be a more than a sign of a flamboyant edifice complex.

It may be a crystal clear signal that the Roman Catholic church in the U.S., which continues to exhibit stronger and stranger evangelistic tendencies, is finally coming out as the evangelical institution that it apparently longs to be.

"If a Married Lesbian Couple Saves 40 Teens from the Norway Massacre and No One Writes About it, Did it Really Happen?"

So asks one blogger who notes that no one in the U.S. mainstream press has picked up this story.

Campers Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen were eating supper across the lake from the ill-fated Norwegian campground. Suddenly they heard gunshots and screams. Without thinking twice, they headed into their boat and steered directly towards the gunfire.

Arriving at the shore, they began to pull youngsters into their boat. The boat could only fit 10 people at a time. So they make four round trips. Forty teenagers who otherwise might have been shot or drowned were saved because of their heroic efforts.

Why haven't we heard more about them? Roz Kaveney, a columnist for the Guardian, suspects the obvious: