That's the real scandal of so many of these calls: the cold remove on the other end of the line. You hear it from clergy, from office managers, and from whoever the office manager transfers the call to (presumably someone who's better equipped than the office manager to answer this sort of query). Flatness. These calls, and the bureaucratic sheen of cruelty, are excruciating: I'm sorry, we can't help you, click.

On November 16th, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Roman Catholic Church will celebrate the eighth World Day of the Poor. This global observance was established by the late Pope Francis in 2017 [to remind us that] that, in Francis’ words, “so long as Lazarus remains at our gate” (Luke 16), the Church’s work is not yet done.

To be clear, I love pet blessings. But what if we also recovered Francis’s radical poverty, simplicity, and love of the human Jesus as an essential way of rebuilding the Church anew?

Maybe it’s not the amount of money that matters for churches today, but their willingness to risk it to try something new.

During the pandemic, I could see and feel the world imagining its way out of a crisis in a way that systematically exiled and disregarded disabled lives, making them at best obsolete and at worst, impossible.