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FutureChurch Co-Founder joins FutureChurch for this 3-part study, exploring her award-winning book, Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity.
Session One: The Socio-Political Contexts
Session Two: Dating and Interpreting Early Christian Art
Session Three: Study Findings
Fr. Robert Duch discusses Bishop Fritz Lobinger’s model for electing community leaders. Learn about the basic structure of the model and its potential in the Catholic Church. Read the text.
Professor Ed Hahnenberg discusses innovative models of ministry being developed to meet the needs of the Church today. He draws on pioneering models in Christian history to show how every age innovates according to the needs of its era. Read the text.
Msgr. Ray Cole discusses the plan developed by the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests for priestless parishes.
Our Mary the Mother of God Packet offers educational and prayer resources to help you learn about and pray with Mary as sister, companion, prophet, disciple and mother.
Cover art: Mary, Mother of Mercy. Copyright by Janet McKenzie. Used with permission.
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Learn more about Sr. Christine Schenk, CSJ, FutureChurch co-founder, whose efforts whose work in Church reform and renewal calls the Church to become a fuller witness of God’s mercy in the world.
Before joining the Cleveland Congregation of Saint Joseph, Christine Schenk confessed “that my whole life I seem to end up getting into these causes that can be edgy, and if that was a problem, we had better talk about it.” Born in Lima, Ohio, Schenk grew up in a devout Catholic family. And she credits much of her involvement in these “edgy” causes to an experience she had in her Catholic high school:
I went to a Catholic high school with a very progressive principal who was very social-justice oriented. Senior year, we went on a trip to teach catechism to farm workers…it ended up being a huge wake-up call about people who didn’t have nearly as much as we did. We were eating the food, but the people harvesting it didn’t have enough food for themselves. It was a foundational moment. That kind of experience at that young an age was really germane to how I thought about social justice and what it meant to be a Catholic going forward. It eventually led me to where I am now.
After high school, Schenk went on to earn her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree in science from Boston College. After college and graduate school, Schenk worked as an interfaith coordinator with the United Farm Workers Union in the early 1970s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During this time, Schenk learned the community organizing skills from Cesar Chavez that would become so vital to her work as co-founder and founding executive director of FutureChurch.
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In 1971, while engaged in study for her doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Sr. Jeannine Gramick was invited to attend a monthly dance hosted by the campus’s Episcopal church. The associate rector of the church had convinced her to come simply to sell soda and other concessions, but accepting the invitation would place Gramick’s life and ministry on a new trajectory. It was at that dance that Gramick first met Dominic Bash, a gay man.
A few weeks later, the two met again at an interfaith service and Gramick came to learn more about the pain her new acquaintance was carrying. Bash had been raised Catholic. He even entered the Franciscans with the intention of becoming ordained. Yet, he left the order early because he was concerned that being gay would prohibit him from being ordained a priest. In time, Bash became a hairdresser and joined the Episcopal Church.“[He] had been thrown out of the confessional one too many times,” Gramick says.
Learn more about and be inspired by Sister Jeannine Gramick’s advocacy for justice for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and for reconciliation between the church and LGBT Catholics.
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National attention was directed to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) in 1979 when Sister Theresa Kane, president of the LCWR, addressed Pope John Paul II at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Her words are still pertinent: “We have heard the powerful message of our church addressing the dignity and reverence of all persons . . . The Church must respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries.” As a result of the greeting, a few congregations withdrew from the Conference, but the LCWR became more public and the membership gained new responsibilities. The LCWR president’s message in 1982 called attention to two realities
Learn more about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and their work to renew the Church and world since Vatican II.
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