It hasn’t been easy to write a column these last two weeks. Or, perhaps, more correctly, it is getting far too easy to write a column these days. Every time we turn around there is something else to write about that would, at one time, have seemed impossible.
I go to a good number of interesting places and get a good amount of strange mail. Sometimes those two distinct dimensions of my life go together. Or not. This was one of those times when they both did and did not.
For all the certainty about the facts of the case, there is still an aura of discontent everywhere about the situation surrounding clerical sex abuse in the church. No one disputes the data now; everyone disputes the nature of the problem. And worse than that, the data simply keeps piling up on all sides.
I got an invitation today. It wasn't to me. It was to Glenn Beck.
Let me give you a little background so you can understand how it happened.
There is a nun in the country this week, a Sister of the Good Shepherd, from Syria. Now, that may not seem much like international news to you but it is. And not only to me.
Being in Ireland as the country and the church continue the torturous process of resolving -- if that's possible -- the standoff between victims of sexual abuse and the local episcopacy, I find myself returning again and again to a strange but impelling image from a filmic past.
I went to Haiti years ago. There was an earthquake going on then, too, but that earthquake was of another making. That earthquake rumbled up from the underground of a people who had been exploited, abandoned, abused and forgotten by their own government and brought to the point of total resistance.
I did not know Mary Daly personally. I never met her professionally. I never heard even one of her public speeches. My concern for women's issues did not come from Daly. I got that from my mother.
My sense of Daly's impact on history comes from every discussion of women's issues in which I ever participated. The impact Daly's ideas and courage was having on other women was palpable. In those living situations, then, I learned a lot from Daly. Most of all, I learned how to look newly at things I'd looked at for so long that I was no longer really seeing any of them.
Welcome to Cop15, the UN Conference on Global Warming being held in Copenhagen. Denmark is not easy to forget. In the first place, every school child knows the tales of fearless, seafaring Danes. In the second place,every traveler remembers Copenhagen as the city of $20.00 hamburgers and $40.00 seven minute taxi cab fares. Copenhagen is, in fact, the second most expensive city in the world, just slightly less expensive to live in than Oslo. But that will be nothing compared to the price the world pays for this conference.
Sr. Joan Chittister is keeping a travel journal as she attends the Asia Pacific Women, Faith and Development Summit to End Global Poverty in Melbourne, Austraila, Dec. 2-3; then the Parliament of the World's Religions, also in Melbourne through Dec. 9, and the U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. Here are her entries on the Parliament of the World's Religions.
It's been quite a two weeks: first there was the Asia Pacific Women, Faith and Development Summit to End Global Poverty in Melbourne, Austraila, Dec. 2-3; then the Parliament of the World's Religions, also in Melbourne through Dec. 9, and now the trip from Melbourne to Copenhagen, Denmark for the U.N. conference on climate change.
The whole collection of events is a life-changing one. It’s like standing on the top of a global mountain and watching the caravan of a whole new world just topping the horizon at the end of a far-away road. I’ll tell you a little about all of them -- what they’re about and what I think they mean to us -- however faraway they may seem on a busy day in small town USA.
Sign up to get NCR updates by email. Existing users: change your preferences here. Enter your email address in the box below and click “Go.”
Not all of our content is online. Subscribe to receive all the news and features you won't find anywhere else.
