Author Archives: Kate Gordon
Breaking: General Efrain Rios Montt Convicted of Genocide in National Courts of Guatemala
The Maya Ixil community, with the support of the Guatemalan community, and the international community, has just won a monumental achievement in the development of international human rights law. Thirty-one years after the Guatemalan military wiped more than 500 indigenous villages off the map, General Efrain Rios Montt, the head of state at the time […]
Pope Francis Begins to Address the Sexual Abuse Crisis
On Thursday, for the first time since his election, Pope Francis addressed the sexual abuse crisis: Vatican City, 5 April 2013 (VIS) – This morning the Holy Father received in audience Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A communique released by that dicastery reads that, during the […]
Pope Francis: Side with the Victims and Heal This Church
The week before Pope Benedict announced his resignation, I found myself at my parish on both Saturday and Sunday without quite managing to go to Mass. I did facilitate a workshop with a good friend on Saturday and attended yet another planning meeting on Sunday, but didn’t take the few steps upstairs to the sanctuary, […]
Pope Francis and the Dirty War: Why His Role Then Matters Today and Reasons for Hope
The media has been full of stories about Pope Francis’ alleged complicity with the junta that ruled Argentina between 1976-1983. Some have claimed that, as the young Jesuit Provincial of Argentina, he was complicit in the kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment of two Jesuit priests at the junta’s most infamous torture center. (Fr. Tom Reese and […]
Efraín Rios-Montt on Trial
Yesterday in Guatemala City, Efraín Rios-Montt, the former military dictator of Guatemala went on trial for his role in the genocide that claimed the lives of 200,000 men, women, children, and babies. Here is a small glimpse into what life was like under his rule: Then they took me to another door, and there were […]
A Better Response to Mental Illness
The events in Newtown snapped me back to the first few months of the onset of my sister’s severe mental illness, when I learned that mental disorders were not individual diseases, but family ones, community ones. All of a sudden, I was twelve again, reading the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and […]
By Saying Your Name, Mary
Though the end of the world did not come as the Mayans predicted (or most likely did not predict), indigenous peoples throughout the world continue to experience threats to their existence. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church in Latin America has made a radical departure from much of its previous history and is now often […]
