Michele Somerville

About 30 years ago, while employed as a very young elementary school teacher in a Catholic school in poor parish school in the Bronx, I was riding in a car with four other faculty members, three of them nuns. At one point our conversation turned to a child in my...

I was not at all surprised to read about the Vatican's fresh attempt to clamp down on nuns in the United States. When the class bully strikes out with the tough guys in the schoolyard, what, in his desperation, does he do? He moves on to the girls. A "Get...

In New York City this week and next, public school students in grades three through eight took, or will take, the state-wide standardized tests. These are the tests you have heard so much about.

These are the tests teachers of integrity are refusing to "teach to," preferring, instead, to...

"God's Rottweiler" seized an opportunity during Holy Week to growl, whimper and call upon Roman Catholic dissidents to choose "radical obedience" to the Magisterium over fidelity to such causes as women's ordination, compulsory celibacy for priests and divorce. Two years ago Joseph Ratzinger declared the discussion of women's ordination over....

Jesuit priest Greg Boyle published a fine opinion piece on March 19, 2012 in the National Catholic Reporter, a glorious sketch of a man the "system" failed to get best of -- one Louis Perez, a man turned around with the help of God, women and men working...

I love attending mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I last took part in a mass celebrated by a cardinal there about six years ago, but found myself having to jump clumsily off one side of the Communion line to the other, at the last minute, in order to avoid receiving...

This week in New York City, more than 50 churches renting space in public schools are faced with finding alternate venues in which to worship. Should churches be able to rent space for religious services in public schools? I don't know.

On one hand, the erosion of the "religious"...

In the aftermath of the Penn State scandal, I heard many parents of adolescents saying, "No kid of mine will attend that school." I was one of them. I still am. That "no kid of mine" list of colleges got a bit longer today.

My 17-year-old daughter is beginning...

We're three years apart, my brother and me. I'm a city mouse. He's a suburb mouse. He drives a big suburban truck. I ride the subway. He works in finance and subsists on Diet Pepsi and cheeseburgers. I'm a latte-sipping, teacher and poet. There's a major cultural divide. On Sundays,...

I have been so busy preparing for Hannukah and Christmas (both) that I have, thus far, pushed away the urge to weigh in on the so-called "December dilemma" (a term used to describe to the quandry in which so called "interfaith" Jewish/Christian couples find themselves as Hanukkah and Christmas approach)....

This week the United States Supreme Court decided not to hear a case filed by a Bronx church (Bronx Household of Faith) which would render a decision on whether it is lawful for religious groups to hold worship services in public school facilities. As a result, 60 churches in New...

I was working for a legal advocacy program run by Presbyterians in a food pantry run by Roman Catholics when I first noticed what seemed at the time some big differences between the social justice ministry styles of Protestants and Catholics.

The woman in charge, a natural minister but...

On the first Sunday in Advent, a new English translation of the Roman Catholic masses was implemented (by mandate) in Catholic churches throughout United States. These changes of the are small, dramatic and disruptive -- especially for the priests celebrating the masses.

Why have these changes been written into...

One of my favorite "Catholic" films is Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking, based on the true story of Louisiana death row inmate Matthew Poncelet and the Catholic Louisiana nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who ministered to Poncelet. This picture offers a chilling look at a condemned man's life and an exquisite...

I've been writing about Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOA Watch, for some time now, so I was saddened to learn that the Nobel Prize-nominated Vietnam veteran turned Roman Catholic priest and human rights activist was detained by police in Rome as he arrived at the Vatican to deliver...

New York Archbishop and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) president Timothy Dolan recently wrote to Barak Obama asking the president to sign the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): "We cannot be silent, however, when federal steps harmful to marriage, the laws defending it, and religious freedom...

I'll celebrate the head of 5772. There will be apples, honey and challah bread on my table. I'll await with excitement the sound of the shofar, and know hearing its sound will run right through me, electric, charged with light. I wont swing a chicken around my head tomorrow, but...

In 1991, Troy Anthony Davis was convicted of murdering off duty-police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. He is slated to die tonight by lethal injection.

According to the New York Times, MacPhail's widow offered the following remarks about the Davis and the State of Georgia's plan...

As I listened to President Obama read Psalm 46 on Sunday at ground zero in New York City, I kept thinking he should have kept God out of it and maybe gone with Rilke.

I practice an Abrahamic religion. I like the Psalms. I pray the Psalms....

Roy Bourgeois is a former missionary, a Nobel Prize nominee, a Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart and a Maryknoll priest, who founded and now presides over SOA Watch, a grassroots organization that is seeking to close down the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

WHINSEC (formerly...