Tom Roberts

When Pope Francis announced 13 new cardinals this week, the name that really jumped out at me was Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini of Huehuetenango, with whom I spent a day during a reporting trip to Guatemala in 2013.

NCR Connections: I'll give pollsters a break in the case where they were asking Catholics about the Eucharist and the real presence. This isn't "Do you like Donald or Hillary?" Yet the reality is far more complex and genuinely edifying.

NCR Connections: The Theology en la Plaza essay "Hate is not welcome aquí" is the plea of four writers that we look carefully and acknowledge the depth of what is occurring all around us.

NCR Connections: We live constantly, don't we, in that tension between authority and charism, between exuberant freedom and institutional necessities, between Francis at the moment of conversion and the Franciscan reality as it has played out over centuries.

National Catholic Reporter was named "best national newspaper" by the Catholic Press Association in its 2019 awards competition. The citation was one of 15 received in the newspaper awards category for reporting, commentary and use of graphics.

NCR Connections: California Catholic initiative points to new ways of engaging with worrisome cultural trends; and the decadeslong, slow-moving implosion of clericalism is accelerating.

NCR Connections: We have a new news editor at NCR, but you already know him; looking back to our first use of "clerical culture" in our pages; changes are coming to the Roman Curia; Global Sisters Report's win on covering a meeting of needs and fulfillment

NCR Connections: Vulnerability, properly understood, is precisely what members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy need to embrace as a strength, argues Fr. James Keenan.

NCR Connections: Neither Call to Action nor religious life is what it once was. The persistent question is "What's next?" The answer may be new forms that are authentic, holy and vibrant.

NCR Connections: Will he or won't he? That's the question being asked in some circles as the date approaches for the pope's appearance at this year's May 6-10 meeting of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), the leaders of the world's congregations of Catholic women religious.

NCR Connections: Distractions abound, but we hope, amid all the noise, to help focus attention on the key issue of the day — the Earth — upon which all else depends. Reaction to the appointment of Wilton Gregory as archbishop of Washington from Fr. Patrick Smith, pastor of D.C.'s St. Augustine Church.

In what he termed "a moment fraught with challenges," the new leader of the Archdiocese of Washington, in his first public appearance here April 4, repeatedly pledged to be honest with his flock.

NCR Connections: We on the outside of hierarchical culture for years have used a phrase to express the central issue: "They don't get it." Which morphed into: "How can it go on this long, and they still don't get it?"

NCR Connections: Clergy culture or clerical culture are quickly becoming well-worn descriptions of an entity that previously went by the more reverential term "priesthood." 

NCR Connections: I would often wonder in the past when the church would turn some corner of realization and figure out how to deal with the crisis. The awareness I slowly came to is that no corner exists around which is some magical, instant conversion. 

NCR Connections: It is difficult to not see grand possibilities in this meeting of unlikely communities, ill-defined as the one might be. It is early in their meeting, but the nuns and "nones" seem to be embarking on an organic exploration of community, contemplation, spirituality.

"The patience of the people of God is exhausted with the episcopal and clerical culture that puts itself first," said Georgetown University's John Carr after a Leadership Roundtable meeting on the clergy sex abuse crisis.

NCR Connections: Humility is about as counter-cultural as one might get given the zero-sum nature of our politics and the culture-war approach many take toward faith. It's win or lose, victory or humiliation.

NCR Today: Help us to keep tracking the walk of faith. Reporting leads everything we do at NCR, and we are able to do that only because of your support.

The talks delivered to the U.S. bishops contain only passing reference to the sex abuse scandal that was the reason behind the unusual retreat, suggested by Pope Francis, and the omission was intentional.