The distance from Seoul to Nashville is 6,927 miles, but some “sister sisters” here feel close to Leadership Conference of Women Religious delegates now in the middle of the annual meeting. Yesterday I had an appointment to meet two women here in Seoul, members of the Little Servants of the Holy Family, a local congregation, that took the Vatican II call seriously and renewed their congregation’s charter and mission following the council.

GSR Today - Oblate Fr. Hank Lemoncelli, an undersecretary from the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, presented U.S. women religious with a series of questions the Vatican is asking all religious congregations, male and female, to reflect on over the next year.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, made up of Catholic women religious who are leaders of their orders in the United States, represents about 80 percent of the 51,600 women religious in the United States. Nearly 800 of the group's 1,400 members have gathered here for their four-day annual conference. There was no mention of troubles at Tuesday's welcoming ceremony, which opened with music, song and interpretive dance. Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain thanked the LCWR members for "an extremely warm welcome."

Cultural insight - A look at the personal side of a disaster that took 300 lives; Kim Young-oh sits under a white tent in the middle of a downtown Seoul plaza. His mission: to force the government of President Park Geun-hye to pass legislation to set up an independent investigation and prosecution for those responsible for the death of 17-year-old daughter.

When Pope Francis arrives here Thursday, he will encounter a vibrant but divided Korean church. It is a church that has grown substantially in numbers in recent decades, but one with significant internal divisions. At the center of this division is how Korean Catholics should engage society and how Catholics should respond to the needs of the poor and the marginalized, especially those displaced by the rapid social and economic change that has occurred here in the past two decades.

GSR Today - In early July Region XI of LCWR held a bi-annual conference for all the sisters of Minnesota, South and North Dakota and Wyoming. Tom Fox and I were invited to plan a day-long program around the new NCR project: Global Sisters Report, and we were excited over their enthusiasm. The sisters also wanted practical ways they could make connections between themselves and Global South sisters.

Inspired by Nicaraguan refugees attending the high school where Dominican Sister of Hope Debbie Blow served as campus minister, the group went to repair damage caused by Hurricane Mitch. Almost two decades later, Blow is now the co-founder and executive director of North Country Mission of Hope, a “humanitarian, spiritually based” organization providing education and community development in Nicaragua. She talked with GSR about the current wave of child migrants to the U.S.

GSR Today - Readers have been asking us about the Dominican Sisters in Iraq, concerned about their safety. They have been posting updates to their website.

Analysis - Traveling through South Korea for five days, Pope Francis will be hard pressed to meet local challenges. He will be called to offer greater meaning to the nation's young people plagued by consumerism, fresh hope to its economically marginalized, encouragement to tired peacemakers, and reconciliation within a fragmented society seemingly searching for a 21st-century identity and a path forward.

If we cannot create a new sisterhood, global sorority will only be a phrase, not a living reality. To do so, what would happen if a meeting were as slow as a long gaze? This long gaze would bring quietness of mind.