U.S. Catholic

OF THE MEN AND WOMEN RESPONDING TO THE U.S. CATHOLIC Reader Survey on inspirational women, 49 percent said the church offers good female role models to women and gifts. Is this a positive statistic? Certainly those who responded, most of whom were...

SOMETHING DIDN'T HAPPEN IN OCTOBER THAT YOU may not have noticed not happening. For the first time in three years, no one in the United States was executed by the state. Confronted by mounting evidence that "improvements" in the process of state-administered...

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK TO church, a new menace has arisen that threatens to radically alter the face of your parish--with lipstick. That's right, women have begun an inexorable takeover of church leadership, and, worse, they are...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SISTER LEONETTE HAD A SPECTACULAR FACE. NOT THAT she was beautiful. In every way that female beauty is judged, she had what might be called a fascinating ugliness. Her stature was short and squarish. Her nose was large and...

FEW HUMAN ACTIVITIES ARE MORE BASIC THAN WALKING, and few more taken for granted. You need to watch an infant to be reminded that walking is a hard-won achievement. Learning to walk is one of the main projects of our first year of life. Somehow it...

Along with his sister and her children, Ousman Adam Abdullah now shares the dusty confines of his tent in eastern Chad with the ghosts of his past. Thinking back on the attack that forced him to free Darfur and separated him from his family members--including...

Several of my female friends have shared with me the trauma they suffered as children. One was assaulted twice at knifepoint and stalked before she was 14. Another was forced to perform oral sex on her brother from the age of 7; at 18 she was sexually...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mark Twain once remarked that "clothes make the man" because "naked people have little or no influence on society." Since clergy aren't known for appearing nude in public, we should probably stick to the question of whether...