By 2024, the National Religious Retirement Office projects that men and women retired from active ministry will outnumber those being paid for their work by four to one. The NRRO provides resources and consultants to help religious communities create and implement strategies to care for their elderly members while remaining financially viable. Yet as religious communities work hard to adjust to the ongoing impact of declining numbers and an aging population, the difficulties they confront are sobering.
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When planning for the needs of retired community members, the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary have the benefit of financial resources, a building that could be renovated to meet their needs and an organic connection with the motherhouse across the street in Immaculata, Penn.

"Winter blankets us with time to remember and tell the stories that sustain."

Rosemarie Pace has been the face of the small yet effective Pax Christi Metro New York for 14 years. PCMNY has a great track record of being the Catholic voice for peace and justice in its region, which includes the New York archdiocese and the Brooklyn diocese.

GSR Today - Like so many people, last month I read Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article about the culture of rape at the University of Virginia and travelled an emotional roller coaster of anger, sadness and disgust. I spent the rest of the day with a sickness throbbing in my heart and stomach. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to cry.

Several years ago I was a Senior Fellow at Woodstock Theological Center working on questions in science and religion. One day the program manager appeared at my door and asked if I wanted some boxes of notes that had been taking up space in his office. The notes happened to be those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

For the past 10 years, Mary Alfonse Nguyen Ngoc Thanh, a former communist party member who converted to Catholicism, has been dedicated to persuading numberless pregnant women against having abortions at hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City. Working with sisters, she says that they have saved innumerable women and children over the last 10 years.

On Dec. 16, the Vatican will release the final report from its investigation of American women religious in 2010. Since the investigation, or apostolic visitation, was announced in 2009, it has been met with indignation from many U.S. Catholics. But while this specific visitation remains controversial, apostolic visitations in and of themselves are not uncommon. In fact, some scholars and theologians point to the New Testament and St. Paul’s visits to Asia Minor as their mode. In the Middle Ages, papal representatives routinely made visits to Catholics throughout Christendom.

On Oct. 8, VonDerrit Myers, who is African American, was shot and killed in the Shaw Neighborhood by a white off-duty St. Louis police officer, who was working security detail that evening for a private company employed by a residents’ association. His death and the subsequent protests eerily similar to the actions following the police shooting of Michael Brown in August in Ferguson, Mo., galvanized Shaw in unprecedented ways.

"O Sacred Presence, awaken in us an awareness of your abiding love."