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Issue Date:  September 3, 2004

Women challenge the church

CALLED TO QUESTION:
A SPIRITUAL MEMOIR
By Joan Chittister
Sheed & Ward, 232 pages, $21.95

The title says it all. In her latest book, Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister draws on her spiritual journals to weave together an examination of the important themes of her busy and remarkable life. Called to Question is divided into six parts examining these themes; sections include “The Inward Life,” “Feminist Spirituality,” “Ecology” and “Dailiness.” Chittister’s narrative exposition is interspersed regularly with paragraphs from her journals. The journal excerpts are reflections -- and often questions -- that were prompted by passages she encountered in her spiritual reading, with sources ranging from the Bible to Madeline L’Engle. The jacket characterizes Called to Question as Chittister’s “most personal and intense writing to date.”

TAUGHT TO BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE: A NEW VISION OF HOPE FOR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIETY
By Jane Kelly
Writers Club Press, 125 pages, $13.95

Jane Kelly, a Sister of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, worked for years at St. Mary of the Angels Church in the Santa Rosa, Calif., diocese. While there, she discovered that Fr. Jorge Salas was stealing from the collection -- and sexually molesting young men. Kelly went public with the issue in 1999, and the resulting press coverage about Salas and Bishop Patrick Ziemann was, as she says, “the beginning of a revolution in the Santa Rosa diocese, if not the entire Roman Catholic church.” Taught To Believe gives Kelly’s first-person account of her Catholic upbringing in the 1940s and ’50s, her early religious life, her run-in with uncooperative diocesan officials at the time of the scandal and her ideas about the future of the church she still loves.
-- Antonia Ryan

CATHOLICS AT A CROSSROADS: COVERUP, CRISIS AND CURE
By Eileen P. Flynn
Paraview Press, 167 pages, $13.95

Theologian Eileen P. Flynn’s book, Catholics at a Crossroads, uses the priest sex scandal as a point of departure for her clearheaded critique of the American Catholic church and the dilemmas and possibilities it confronts today. Catholics have undergone a radical change as hierarchical complicity and duplicity have become more apparent, she reports. "No longer are [they] willing to allow their pastors to exercise unquestioned authority, nor are they susceptible to intimidation by bishops." Flynn brings passion, realism and positive prescription to the current discussion.
-- Wayne A. Holst
 

National Catholic Reporter, September 3, 2004

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