NCR Editorial Staff

We say: While the culture warriors in the U.S. bishops' conference have been obsessed with sexual ethics, what we need right now are the core principles of Catholic social teaching: solidarity, the common good, human dignity of all.

We say: Four years ago, on the first anniversary of the encyclical, an NCR editorial heralded "the emergence of a lay-led, community-based, action-oriented movement for the environment." Has that happened?

Incarceration shouldn't be a death sentence, especially for nonviolent offenders, or those awaiting trial but unable to afford bail, in our nation's already overcrowded jails and prisons.

Friendships have existed in the past between U.S. presidents and princes of the church. But it is rare, if not unprecedented, that the church's leadership would be co-opted to the degree seen in the case of Trump.

While the world struggles against a microbial menace, nature itself is under attack from the deliberate and steady overthrow by the Trump administration of environmental regulations, some in place for decades.

Maybe our questions out of quarantine — a pope and people in place, captive to the unseen and unheard — are too small, too much about mechanics and organizational strategies.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the presumption that clerics will somehow figure a way to safely conduct public services and distribute the Eucharist is delusional.

Catholics who bought the single-issue strategy find themselves stuck in what once was a fun house now turned house of horrors, incongruously lashed to Trump, while the daily reality is a grim report of the spiraling number of sick and dying.

The saintly designation tends to obscure the saint's ordinary flesh-and-blood reality. It is a tendency to resist at all costs when commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of St. Óscar Romero.

The coronavirus threat has stopped us in our tracks and is forcing fundamental questions about who we are and what we will become, about what our communities of faith mean in a time of lockdown and quarantine.

The reality, easily observable, is that most of the service in the church, especially in the form of ministry and teaching, is done by women. The power to decide resides almost exclusively with ordained men.

We say: March 2020 may go down as the month that turned our world on its head, or at least made us think more about the precariousness of the ordinary and the power of the unseen.

We say: The church owes Archbishop John Wester and Bishop Steven Biegler a debt of gratitude for going on the record against anonymous accounts that claim Pope Francis called Jesuit Fr. James Martin to task over his ministry to LGBT Catholics.

We say: The undertaking was daunting from the start and disappointing in some respects at the end; compared to what went before, though, we prefer the new pathway that Pope Francis has opened.

In recent weeks, the courts rendered decisions in two cases involving First Amendment guarantees of the free exercise of religion. We agree with both decisions, but deplore one of the outcomes.

It's reasonable to feel that the U.S. Senate's failure to convict President Donald Trump is cause for despair. Yet there were heroes in the process, who stepped up for truth at a time when falsehood is the coin of the political realm.

"Remind our senators that they alone are accountable to you for their conduct." Every day, the Senate chaplain would plead to the heavens for courage and integrity. Alas, he got little of both.

We say: Some of the greatest beneficiaries of lay engagement in the post-Vatican II era are the entrepreneurs who understand the advantages of being an individual seller to a captive audience in a top-down organization where the hierarchy is, for all practical purposes, dysfunctional.

For the confidence of the people of God, the abuse charges against Bishop DiMarzio cry out for an investigation. Our problem is with making diocesan neighbor Cardinal Dolan responsible for leading an inquiry.

The U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani has occasioned a new round of all-too-familiar rhetoric about enemies deserving of death, even if questions are being raised about the strategy and its fallout.