by Sr Ann Catherine Swailes o.p.

Whichever way you look at it, the Ascension, which we commemorated liturgically last week, seems like an odd sort of a feast, but I wonder if it’s not one that we should regard with new eyes, new expectation.

At first sight, it seems to commemorate a leave-taking; the departure of the Lord from the community which had so recently welcomed him back into their midst after his Passion and death. Psychological common sense would suggest, surely, that confusion and trauma, rather than rejoicing, would have been the disciples’ reaction, and there doesn’t seem much to celebrate in that.

At least as strangely, according to St Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples are called to account for what seems to be a

by Sr Tamsin Mary Geach o.p.

In a video by Bishop Barron he says that surveys of people outside the Church show them as seeing the Church’s teaching on sexuality as unrealistic, exclusive and cruel. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuYzb4Li9iY , about at the 1 minute mark.) Others identify Church teaching as an unwarranted intrusion by clerics, who by definition are male, and by vocation usually single and celibate, into other people’s private lives, laying burdens on people which they do not lift a finger to help with.  The Church’s teaching on abortion was denigrated by a religious sister in the USA as being too narrow in its scope: "I do not believe that just because you are opposed to

by Sr. Pauline Burling o.p.

A talk given at the Women's Day of recollection, Lent 2022

It seems fitting that on the Eve of Palm Sunday we are going up to Jerusalem and thereby follow the Prophet Isaiah’s invitation:

 “Come, let us go up the mountain of the Lord to the House of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.’          [Isaiah 2:3]