“Women Talking” is an exploration of the way that religion can be used to imprison people—and what’s worse, to teach them to imprison themselves.

The changing demographics of the Catholic Church in the United States raises the question: How well do Cardinal Robert McElroy’s views reflect the various perspectives present in the growing Latino community?

After two professors of theology engaged in a fruitful conversation in America on the 2019 Vatican document on “‘gender theory in education,” the editors invited them each to respond once again to each other on the subject of gender identity and transgender persons.

Pope Francis hit out strongly against the way people have sought to manipulate Benedict’s death. “People who instrumentalize such a good person, [a man] of God, almost I would say a holy father of the church, have no ethics,” he said. “They are of a party, not of the church.”

In addition to the critique of Cardinal McElroy’s focus on welcome and inclusion, critics are also reacting to the process through which that could happen: the ongoing synod of bishops.

“Our sexual lives have many areas of sinfulness and I’m not challenging that,” Cardinal McElroy says this week on the Jesuitical podcast. “All I’m saying is that in the Christian moral life, they don’t automatically represent mortal sin.”

“As I heard the chant ‘Cardinal Pell should go to Hell,’ I thought, ‘Ah ha! At least they now believe in the afterlife!’ Perhaps this is St. George Pell’s first miracle,” former Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.

Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., a priest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, describes the joy of Congolese people at the pope's visit and his hopes for what the pope's journey might bring.

The pope and Cardinal McElroy both made statements this week on L.G.B.T. issues, which have until recently not been discussed by church officials.

We must examine the contradictions in a church of inclusion and shared belonging that have been identified by the voices of the people of God in our nation and discern in synodality a pathway for moving beyond them.