"Collectively, rural women are a force that can drive global progress."

Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul train young women to be housemaids and advocate for respectable working conditions in Vietnam's largest city. Sr. Pascale Le Thi Triu said her community saw a growing need for housemaids in the economically booming Ho Chi Minh City eight years ago, so they took the initiative to help. “We have trained 300 professional housemaids and have met only one fourth of the demand for housemaids in the city,” she said.

GSR Today - The thing about Ebola that strikes a nerve – the thing about any disease, really – is that it peels back so many layers of tension and injustice. Disease brings into sharp focus just who, exactly, are the haves and the have-nots in this world.

Gloria Del Carmen Herrera Sixco, a Daughter of Charity Sister from El Salvador, recently left her work at the Lucelia Bontemps Health Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to travel to Boston, where Medicines for Humanity was honoring the Daughters of Charity of Haiti with its Humanitarian of the Year award. Sr. Gloria is director of the Lucelia Bontemps Health Center in the Sibert area of Port au Prince, which serves hundreds of Haitians a day.

Name a ministry, and Mercy Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, 77, has been part of it. She has served on countless boards of universities, health systems, hospitals, seminaries, and high schools in her 61 years in religious life.

We need to wake up to this world in evolution and to realize there is much at stake here; we are either participating in the birth of Christ in evolution or we are mourning the death of the human species, of which God became a preeminent member.

For the last 50 years, the prevailing narrative in the United States has been that the number of Catholic sisters is steadily declining. However, in a special report released today, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate says maybe we should reconsider that blunt storyline. 

The Servants of the Holy Eucharist in the Philippines are soley focused on restorative justice. Through this charism they work with Caritas to help inmates return to community life by supporting their families and providing transition services. Last year through painstaking research, their paralegals were also able to free 108 people who were wrongly imprisoned.

Given the reality that most of us younger sisters are part of a very small age cohort in our own communities, we should be building relationships now with age peers across congregation lines so that we can support one another in the coming decades. Certainly, our demographic reality means that we not only have an unusual opportunity to develop intergenerational friendships, we also have a lot of experience in saying goodbye. My experience as a Catholic sister has helped me to realize that grief and play must be intertwined.