Bowling with Nuns was one of many events around the country marking the fifth annual National Catholic Sisters Week, which ran from March 8 to 14. The week's purpose is to honor women religious, bring awareness of sisters in the United States to laypeople, and perhaps draw young women to join missions.

"Can we believe just a little longer? It will get darker still, but we will be drawn up and up."

We live in a world that seems to be unraveling before our eyes. But even in the midst of this collapse, there is a resurgence of grassroots efforts to make a difference. 

In a Haitian neighborhood of subsistence-farm families where people struggle to put food on the table each day, Lekòl Jezi-Mari, a primary school under the care of a Religious of Jesus and Mary, educates 576 students — some of them the first in their families to graduate from sixth grade.

"For some reason, God tends to deal with me in tidal waves rather than whispers. I attribute that to the fact that I'm hard to get through to!"

Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble keeps a small ceramic skull on her desk and tweets the thoughts it inspires daily. Despite the morbid connotations, most of Noble's tweets about death aren't really about death at all.

Take a plant cutting and let it grow in new soil: Keep the constitutive elements (lifelong consecrated celibacy and community) and replant them. Engage today's seekers in open and honest dialogue and then give them space to create community. Trust in God to lead us.

"People who pass by, who go ahead in life without taking account of the needs of others, without noticing the many spiritual and material needs, are people who pass without living; they are people who are not useful to others."

Sr. Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and a longtime advocate for immigrants and refugees, will receive the University of Notre Dame's 2018 Laetare Medal at the school's graduation ceremony May 20.