Tom Roberts

NCR Connections: The paradoxes pile up today. We're forced to understand our common humanity, an understanding made possible technologically as never before. Yet we are forced to stay away from one another.

It is noteworthy that a lay organization can fill a hotel ballroom in Washington with a mix of people, including members of the hierarchy, for frank dialogue about the church and the abuse crisis.

Sr. Carol Zinn, LCWR executive director, and Archbishop Charles Scicluna, an investigator of clergy sex abuse, spoke with NCR about transformation and the need for the church hierarchy to confront its past.

NCR Connections: Given the headlines of recent weeks, our stories that you've spent so much time with, I think it is safe to say we've lived with a numbing number of disturbances outside our door.

Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche, an organization of communities dedicated to caring for people with intellectual disabilities, engaged in sexually abusive relationships with at least six adult women.

NCR Connections: Recent talks by McElroy and Cupich model communication that starts with the belief that God is active in the lives of people and that well-formed Catholic consciences deserve respect.

NCR Connections: The Catholic Church in the U.S. has been used and manipulated by the era's most unconscionable con artist. But there is an alternative model to being captive of far-right political operatives.

NCR Connections: We are troubled by organizations that target voters by collecting mobile phone location data when they go to Sunday Mass and also by conferences like a recent one at Boston College that includes academics and bishops but takes place behind closed doors.

NCR Connections: Jesuit Fr. James Keenan really wants to turn the whole deal on its head. "Hierarchicalism," he writes, "and its lack of accountability and ability to act with impunity will be harder to dismantle than clericalism and in fact will guarantee the survival of clericalism, for the former is the father and promoter of the second." He proposes an alternative "culture of vulnerability as a path to a "servant priesthood" and a "servant episcopacy."

NCR Connections: "Light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else." With gratitude to Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr for that beautiful line from his latest book, it seems a fitting frame for the season and for the era.

NCR Connections: The clergy sexual abuse crisis "is evidence of a profound contradiction that reaches to the foundational core of the institutional church," the former Dominican told a Gonzaga University audience.

NCR Connections: "What can we do?" is a question we at NCR most encounter, if "they" at the top don't want to do anything and don't want you to do anything. But what if one of "them" is asking the same question?

For over four decades, Jason Berry has offered readers a mix of his intense examination of the ugliest side of Catholic reality and the soul-restoring gumbo of Louisiana life, particularly his hometown New Orleans.

NCR Connections: Through five years of reporting, NCR makes the case that something unusual has developed in the church in the U.S., influencing the conversation on Catholic social teaching and economics.

NCR Connections: The pope changed the metaphor for the Catholic community from maintaining borders to a community on a journey, with the work of the individual more a matter of accompaniment than judgment.

NCR Connections: She was a wonderful public Catholic, someone for whom faith was so obviously an influence in her relentless pursuit of the truth but also in her broad embrace of humanity.

Comparing the task facing the church to the Herculean labor of cleaning the Augean stables, Collins said she believes significant change can occur only with continuous pressure "by lay people who love the church."

In a recent talk, Fr. Bryan Massingale argues that the deepest problem faced by LGBTQI Catholics — the one that causes us the most pain, alienation, and self-estrangement — is that they've been told a false story about God and have been given false images of God. 

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.