Grace on the Margins is a weekly column from award-winning writer Jamie Manson.
“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.
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.
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.
The stroke of midnight this past Sunday morning ushered in a new era in human rights for gay and lesbian New Yorkers. From Niagara Falls to the southern shore of Long Island, same sex couples, many of them already in committed relationships for decades, were awarded hundreds of legal rights they had long been denied.
Some of those living outside of the New York metro area may have read about last week’s shocking murder of Leiby Kletzky, an eight-year old boy from an Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn.
Kletzky disappeared while walking home from day camp. It was his first time walking alone and he took a wrong turn. He stopped to ask a man for directions. Cameras show the man bringing Kletzky into his car. It was the last time Kletzky was seen alive.
It’s been more than a decade since the Vatican attempted to silence Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent from their work with gay and lesbian Catholics.
Though Nugent agreed in 2000 to abide by the church’s prohibition on speaking and writing about homosexuality, Gramick politely declined. In a statement that has become a mantra for many Catholics who seek reforms in the institutional church, Gramick responded, “I choose not to collaborate in my own oppression.”
It took nearly two days for Archbishop Timothy Dolan to comment on the historic passage of legislation allowing gays and lesbian to marry in the state of New York.
He waited until he had concluded Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s on the Feast of Corpus Christi. As chance, or the Holy Spirit, would have it, this was also Gay Pride Sunday.
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