"They are glow-worms of faith, illuminating the night."

Last month I returned from my first visit to India. I was invited to lead a week's workshop on “Earth Democracy: Defending the Rights of People and Mother Earth” with Dr. Vandana Shiva and her sister Dr. Mira Shiva, a physician and leader in public health. The course took place at the Navdanya Biodiversity Learning Center at Bija Vidapeeth University in Dehradun, India.

Sr. Clara Animottil’s mission is to put smiles on the faces of children found homeless and loitering around railway platforms. After fighting systemic corruption among local railway officials and police, she now operates two centers where nearly 80 children who were formerly living on the streets and being exploited have a home. Since 2000 she and her staff have reunited thousands of orphaned or runaway children with their families.

The Nun in the World symposium - Religious life needs to be put in its proper historic context, said Congregation of Jesus Sr. Gemma Simmonds: The huge numbers of women religious in the 1950s were a spike never before seen in the history of the church – not the baseline by which things should be measured – and religious life is much more responsive and individual since the reforms of Vatican II.

The chapel of Divine Providence Hospital in El Salvador is one of the most visited places by local and foreign pilgrims. They come wishing to learn more about Archbishop Oscar Romero, the controversial archbishop who has become a Salvadoran icon. In 1966, the Congregation of the Carmelite Missionary Sisters of St. Therese built this hospital under the leadership of Sr. Luz Isabel Cuevas Santana, a Mexican missionary who saw the need to care for cancer patients. It was in the small chapel of the hospital that on March 24, 1980, Romero was killed, shot near his heart, just as he prepared to consecrate the host.

In the coming weeks, Pope Francis will release his new encyclical on the environment. Bloggers and pundits alike have been speculating on what exactly the pope will say, while social justice advocates are almost dancing in the streets, exuberant that the highest ranking official of the church is taking Catholic social teaching seriously.  

Sr. Helen Prejean, the death penalty abolition advocate, told a jury May 11 that convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev expressed remorse in discussions with her. Prejean, the Sister of Saint Joseph of Medaille and author of, Dead Man Walking, said during the defense's portion of the sentencing phase of Tsarnaev's trial that she had met with him five times since March.

May 8 a divided 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the sabotage convictions of three Plowshares protestors, one of them a nun in her mid-80s, Sr. Megan Rice, and remanded the case to a lower court. The three-judge panel upheld one conviction against the trio on a charge of depredation of property.

A plethora of conferences about women have popped up all over Rome in the last three months. The Vatican's former hard-line freeze on discussing women's roles may at last be thawing out. The Pontifical Council for Culture's controversial February event, "Women's Cultures: Equality and Difference," was the first to break the ice. A month later, Voices of Faith hosted a searingly honest discussion by female theologians and activists from inside Vatican walls.

GSR Today - Even at a symposium studying the effect of the Second Vatican Council on women religious, it is difficult to overstate the effect the council had. Fifty years later, Catholics are still discovering – and often arguing over – those effects, how the council documents should be interpreted and what the whole business means.