Bhutan's model of Gross National Happiness a glorious goal for modern society
From Where I Stand: Bhutan, a tiny country between China and India, has chosen a spiritual rather than economic metric of achievement, and it's refreshing.
From Where I Stand: Bhutan, a tiny country between China and India, has chosen a spiritual rather than economic metric of achievement, and it's refreshing.
From Where I Stand: If working to elevate the role and status of women around the world is tainted work, then we women religious are obviously guilty as charged.
From Where I Stand: So much will be written about Pope Francis, so we should instead explore the way things are with the People of God.
From Where I Stand: The church could use this opportunity to do a little demystifying to better connect with the 21st-century world.
From Where I Stand: On Valentine's Day, stand up for the women treated as things, beaten and bruised, used and exploited sexually.
From Where I Stand: It's true, yes, that being without a gun can get a person killed, but it is also true that simply having a gun does not guarantee survival.
From Where I Stand: I get a lot of questions in my mail, many of them personal, many of them professional -- meaning ones that are usually requests for comments or articles.
It happened in the midst of LCWR's pending visitation from Rome on the viability and depth of commitment in orders of women religious in the United States.
One of Rome's great concerns about U.S. religious orders of women, it seems, is the lack of young early adult vocations in the United States today. Why U.S. women's orders, in the face of large-scale decline in numbers of both religious and priests in Europe as well, should merit such special attention on this subject, I'm not sure. I do think, however, that the subject in general needs to be rethought and perhaps reframed. Even by religious orders themselves.
Here's an American statistic for you about "American exceptionalism" that seems to get lost under the headlines about a slowly recovering economy and a growing number of billionaires. This figure -- at least between attempted massacres like in Austin, Texas, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Aurora and the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, to name a few -- rarely surfaces. The fact that we lose 48,000 people a year in this country to the attacks of private people using privately owned guns seldom makes headlines. Only the atrocities they leave behind them sell newspapers.
This month, it was the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that bishops were concerned about. Before that, it was Catholic Charities in the United States. Then it was Caritas, the church's umbrella organization for the coordination of international charity. And now it is the Girl Scouts. Each of them has been curtailed, "investigated" or put in some kind of canonical receivership because of their reputed lack of orthodoxy on sexual issues or because of association with other groups that, according to the bishops, have the same problem. And all of that in the face of the sex abuse debacle of the church itself, still to be resolved, never monitored, and totally closed to outside investigation.