Tom Roberts

Lawyer and author Jeanne Bishop speaks with NCR about heartbreak and healing. She has written about the shooting death of her pregnant sister and brother-in-law, and how she made peace with their convicted killer.

Commentary: A wealthy network that puts forth a peculiarly American version of Catholicism has far more influence than U.S. bishops have in shaping the image and purpose of the church in the wider culture.

Essay: With one more wager, the chance to win it all, the bishops placed all they had on Trump, on this unstable gadfly whose propensity to smash democratic norms just might yield the Supreme Court they desired.

Commentary: Pope John Paul II's actions in the McCarrick report warrant condemnation today. Yet the report establishes that what he did was not extraordinary at the time; it was expected within the culture.

Commentary: President Donald Trump is a threat to the republic and its democratic institutions on multiple levels. At the base of all the current turmoil lie perennial questions that have to do with moral authority and spiritual integrity.

Appreciation: Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns and Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara, stand apart as exemplary servants of the Gospel and their communities in the most threatening conditions and among some of the most marginalized on Earth. We would all do well to revisit their lives and example at a time of global fear and uncertainty.

NCR Connections: The early church didn't alter what the disciples had seen and heard. But what they understood flowing from that experience matured and grew over centuries and continues to in our time. It's my time to hand over NCR to the next executive editor, Heidi Schlumpf.

NCR Connections: Holy Week is here, and NCR has a special virtual presentation of Triduum observations for you; take a closer look into our coronavirus coverage; one more look back at St. Óscar Romero

NCR Connections: The paradoxes pile up today. We're forced to understand our common humanity, an understanding made possible technologically as never before. Yet we are forced to stay away from one another.

It is noteworthy that a lay organization can fill a hotel ballroom in Washington with a mix of people, including members of the hierarchy, for frank dialogue about the church and the abuse crisis.

Sr. Carol Zinn, LCWR executive director, and Archbishop Charles Scicluna, an investigator of clergy sex abuse, spoke with NCR about transformation and the need for the church hierarchy to confront its past.

NCR Connections: Given the headlines of recent weeks, our stories that you've spent so much time with, I think it is safe to say we've lived with a numbing number of disturbances outside our door.

Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche, an organization of communities dedicated to caring for people with intellectual disabilities, engaged in sexually abusive relationships with at least six adult women.

NCR Connections: Recent talks by McElroy and Cupich model communication that starts with the belief that God is active in the lives of people and that well-formed Catholic consciences deserve respect.

NCR Connections: The Catholic Church in the U.S. has been used and manipulated by the era's most unconscionable con artist. But there is an alternative model to being captive of far-right political operatives.

NCR Connections: We are troubled by organizations that target voters by collecting mobile phone location data when they go to Sunday Mass and also by conferences like a recent one at Boston College that includes academics and bishops but takes place behind closed doors.

NCR Connections: Jesuit Fr. James Keenan really wants to turn the whole deal on its head. "Hierarchicalism," he writes, "and its lack of accountability and ability to act with impunity will be harder to dismantle than clericalism and in fact will guarantee the survival of clericalism, for the former is the father and promoter of the second." He proposes an alternative "culture of vulnerability as a path to a "servant priesthood" and a "servant episcopacy."

NCR Connections: "Light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else." With gratitude to Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr for that beautiful line from his latest book, it seems a fitting frame for the season and for the era.

NCR Connections: The clergy sexual abuse crisis "is evidence of a profound contradiction that reaches to the foundational core of the institutional church," the former Dominican told a Gonzaga University audience.