"Whatever defamation of character my enemies are spreading about me, I do not feel the need to justify myself toward them. While discretion obliges me to remain silent, my duty compels me to prevent them from doing any more harm."

As a vowed religious with nearly 40 years of profession, I cannot speak for the newest generation of religious in apostolic congregations. But I feel impelled as one called (and privileged) to accompany novices to share some reflections on the next coming age of religious life.

GSR Today - Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a memo stating that The U.S. Department of Justice would phase out using private contractors to run federal prisons.

Sr. Margaret Farrell, a Religious Sister of Charity from Ireland who was sent to California as a novice in the late 1980s to serve in Los Angeles' juvenile halls and who has been the spiritual director of Covenant House California since 2001, finds that even today, there are Los Angeles natives who are oblivious to Skid Row's existence.

Two Austrian Catholic nuns who spent more than 40 years working with people with Hansen's disease, also known as leprosy, on the South Korean island of Sorok have been awarded the prestigious Korean Manhae Award for Social Work and recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Two top bodies of the Catholic church in India are now busy finalizing a policy to address sex abuse and other forms of abuse by clergy. "A draft policy is in the final stage now. It has been circulated among all bishops and major superiors in India," says Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India.

There are rare moments when one experiences a fullness of time. A time and place where the previous years' hopes and desires emerge as an intensified whole deeper and more grounded than one could have hoped. That was my experience of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious' (LCWR) Assembly this year.

Photo essay - Along the banks of the Saigon River in Ho Chi Minh City, a small dairy farm is couched in the compound of the motherhouse of the Lovers of the Holy Cross of Thu Thiem. The convent dates back 176 years. For the last 26, Sr. Martha Nguyen Thi Quan has been the chief operator of the farm.

"Prayer isn't meant to change things; it is meant to change us."