Surely, I thought, this must be a joke as I read a news headline saying that the word “nun” has been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. But it’s no joke. Lisa Saunders, a mom in Ireland, discovered that the new edition of the dictionary had dropped a bunch of words. Upon cl...

The Vatican has just announced an Apostolic Visitation “in order to look into the quality of the life� of women religious in the United States. The announcement was made public in a news conference at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, on January ...

There’s been a lot of media around the topic of declining numbers of Catholic sisters and nuns. Beyond the veil: Debate continues on why number of nuns is declining, a recent article from Catholic News Service, highlights a couple of arguments about why the decline in number. “Italian Cl...

It has been an exciting week in the world of nuns. Because this was National Vocation Awareness Week, many newspapers and blogs ran stories about Catholic sisters and nuns, brothers and monks and friars, and deacons and priests. Here’s a bit of what I found about sisters and nuns. Seeing the R...

The Flying Nun is an icon in many people’s imagination — whether Catholic or non-Catholic, whether you saw the originals or just the re-runs. The Flying Nun was a sitcom in the late 1960s starring a young comic Sally Field as Sister Bertrille, a novice with the Daughters of Charity who c...

Sister Dorothy Stang, SNDdeN , was a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur who was killed in February 2005 because of her work with and on behalf of the people of Brazil. She had lived in Brazil for over 40 years ago and worked with the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization of the Catholic Church that f...

Today’s nuns answer calls to serve differently   Modern sisters reach out to the world around them in ways unlike their stereotype Nancy Lofholm The Denver Post March 23, 2008 GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. Sister Karen Bland is a thoroughly modern Catholic nun. Her gold Chevrolet Malibu is proof. The...

Yesterday I went to a great lecture at Loyola University called “ A Question of Habit: The Curious Image of Nuns in Film and Popular Culture ” by Professor Bren Ortega Murphy. Dr. Murphy is in the process of making a documentary film that examines the wide variety of visual images of Cat...