The skyline of Fort Worth, Texas. / Credit: 21 Aerials/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Dec 12, 2025 / 09:41 am (CNA).
Bishop Michael Olson of the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, has announced the opening of a new order of Discalced Carmelite nuns after an older one in the diocese lost its canonical status last year.
Olson announced the news of the opening in a letter on Dec. 2 in which he said the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life gave permission for the new monastery.
The prelate described it as “a moment of extraordinary grace for our local Church.”
In an interview with CNA, Olson said there has been “a need in our diocese for prayers, for reparation of sin … and through adoration and contemplation and meditation, to pray for all of those intentions — that is the vocation of the new Carmel.”
Olson said that about six months ago he requested that a new order of nuns come to reside in the diocese from the Christ the King Association of Discalced Carmelite Monasteries in the U.S.A.
After making a formal request for permission from the Holy See in October, he received word in November that the Holy See approved the establishment of the new monastery.
The nuns are coming from the Carmel in Lake Elmo, Minnesota.
The bishop emphasized that the Carmel “is an autonomous body even though I have supervisory rights.”
He said the land was “donated generously by the faithful in the diocese” after he acted as an intermediary between the sisters and parishioners.
Asked when he believes the monastery, located in a rural part of northern Cooke County about 80 miles north of Dallas, will be completed, he replied: “That’s in God’s time.”
He said the sisters will not have a website “because it’s a distraction from their religious life. Social media can have adverse effects on a religious vocation, as we have seen.”
Olson told CNA he is “very grateful to the Holy See for this permission, but also to the religious sisters, the nuns who have given of themselves to Christ. It’s a very unique vocation.”
The bishop is encouraging people to be generous with the sisters as they establish their new home in the Fort Worth Diocese: “They’re in full communion with the Church, are rightly ordered in their Carmelite vocation.”
A new page for the Carmelites after scandal
In 2023, a public scandal erupted after Olson began an investigation of an alleged relationship of a sexual nature between the former prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Arlington, Rev. Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, and a priest outside the diocese.
Gerlach denied the allegation and accused Olson of overstepping his authority while seeking to obtain the nuns’ property located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Olson has denied both claims.
The scandal played out in the press through actions taken by the Vatican, lawsuits in civil courts, and through public statements on both sides.
Last December, the Vatican issued a decree of suppression of the Arlington Carmelite monastery.
Olson announced the suppression just over a year ago, on Dec. 2, 2024, emphasizing at the time that the women at the monastery “are neither nuns nor Carmelites despite their continued and public self-identification to the contrary.”
He added that the Holy See “suppressed the monastery, so it exists no longer, despite any public self-identification made to the contrary by the former nuns who continue to occupy the premises.”
In August of that year, the nuns posted on their website that they had joined the Society of St. Pius X, a group that is in an “irregular” canonical situation within the Church.
‘May their vocation bring forth many graces’
In his most recent letter announcing the new monastery, Olson said it “will be a place where the beauty of contemplative life radiates outward into the world. Through prayer, silence, work, and sacrifice, the Discalced Carmelite nuns will accompany the faithful and intercede for the needs of our communities.”
“I ask all the faithful of the diocese to join me in prayer for these nuns as they begin this new chapter in their vocation,” the bishop said.
“May their vocation bring forth many graces including priestly and religious vocations, holy and happy marriages, and faithful discipleship,” he added.
Read More
![Bishops discuss faith formation before National Catholic Youth Conference #Catholic
Organizers of Pope Leo XIV’s upcoming digital dialogue with young people Nov. 21 at the National Catholic Youth Conference in Indianapolis speak to the media at the site of the United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference Fall Plenary Assembly in Baltimore on Nov. 12, 2025. Left to right: Cardinal Christophe Pierre, papal nuncio to the United States; Montse Alvarado, president and COO of EWTN News; Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez, Archdiocese of Philadelphia; Christina Lamas, executive director of National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry; and Archbishop Charles Thompson, Archdiocese of Indianapolis. / Credit: Shannon Mullen/National Catholic Register
Baltimore, Maryland, Nov 17, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Bishops discussed young Catholics’ place in the Church ahead of the National Catholic Youth Conference.At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Fall Plenary Assembly in Baltimore, bishops spoke about the young generation as many prepare to attend NCYC. The conference will take place Nov. 20–22 in Indianapolis for prayer, community, evangelization, and service among Catholic teenagers.During NCYC, Pope Leo XIV will hold a digital dialogue with teens from across the nation. “When the pope speaks, he speaks to the world, and this will be a wonderful, wonderful moment. This encounter will engage young people in real time,” said Archbishop Nelson Pérez of Philadelphia. At a Nov. 12 press conference at the USCCB fall plenary, Pérez said “there is a deep significance to this encounter.” He added: “It reflects the Holy Father’s desire to connect with young people, with our youth, whom his predecessor … Pope Francis, called ‘the now of God.’”Pérez said during his time as a priest and bishop, he has noticed teenagers “want a place in the Church.” He said: “They want to be seen, heard, and valued, which is so beautiful ... They want to be loved by the Church.”“Even in today’s interconnected world, the Church can seem far away from young people. The Holy Father’s choice to encounter the American youth ... is an expression of his closeness to the youth of the world.”“This moment will mark a powerful opportunity for young people to witness the beauty of the universal Church with our Holy Father and to express their concerns, voices, experience, [and] what’s in their hearts,” Pérez said.Bishop Joseph Espaillat, auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of New York, has attended NCYC more than a dozen times. He told CNA “the energy and the vibrancy of the young people” is why he returns each year.“It’s not just the local parish or the local diocese, but it’s the national Church and there’s something powerful when we come together,” Espaillat said.This year’s event is “the first time ever the Holy Father has a live online interview like this,” at NCYC, Espaillat said. “What I love about it is that the Church in the United States is leading right now. The young people being the focus with our Holy Father is going to be great, and it’s going to produce a lot of positive energy in our Church.”Espaillat encouraged attendees “to be open and allow yourself to be surprised by the Holy Spirit.” He added: “Don’t go in with a preconceived notion. It is a great event in which there are many, many fruits. I’ve seen young people just come to life at the event.”Youth draw closer to the ChurchAs thousands of teenagers plan to gather at the national conference, U.S. bishops further explained why so many young Catholics are looking to the Church. A number of bishops highlighted the Catholic presence on social media is helping to draw them in.Bishop William Byrne of Springfield, Massachusetts, told CNA the exponential growth of young Catholics coming to the Church is “amazing and exciting.” Byrne, who served as chair for the USCCB’s committee on communications, detailed how much its online presence has grown its outreach to the young generation and wider population. “Beginning with the illness of our beloved Pope Francis, through the funeral, and then the transition to Pope Leo, we’ve actually had a 226% growth in our social media on the four platforms we use — TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube,” he said.“The amazing thing is, it’s still growing. It means that people are seeing it, sharing it,” Byrne said. He specifically noted it’s the “young people” spreading the message online. “So we see that we are reaching people,” Byrne said. “But our goal is not to get people locked on their phones. Our goal is to get people locked on Jesus Christ and have the impression be Jesus Christ and his bride, the Church.”“This is an exciting time. It’s not without its challenges, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity,” Byrne said. “We’re reaching young people who are curious and hungry. It’s so exciting to see the Church continue to speak to the world, because the Church has never lost her relevance.”The start of the Catholic online presence followed the movement of the new atheists, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, said. He told CNA the movement was made up of “people who were really shaping the culture, saying: ‘There’s no purpose of life. We come from nowhere. We go nowhere. There’s no objective moral value.’”“A lot of people, myself included, began to get on social media with a religious voice,” Barron said. “People who had not heard a religious voice or who were disaffiliated … could find people like me and many others who were actually talking about God and about religion.”“But I think as a whole generation came of age, they realized what a desperately sad and empty message that is,” Barron said. “There’s this hunger in the heart for God, and so that just reasserts itself. I think a lot of younger people who were raised on this very vapid philosophy began to look to religion.”As more young Catholics get involved in youth formation whether in their parishes or at larger gatherings like NCYC, Barron said he encourages them to use the opportunities to “build community and build a sense of family with other believers.”Barron, who is the founder of the Catholic media organization Word on Fire, has gained nearly 3 million YouTube subscribers and millions of other followers across social media platforms. But, he said, “one drawback of social media is that it’s a little private world. It can be a lot of people accessing it, but privately.”“Maybe through social media an individual finds a path to religion, but then to look around a room and see thousands of other people that are on a similar path — that’s a great thing,” Barron said.](http://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/bishops-discuss-faith-formation-before-national-catholic-youth-conference-catholic-organizers-of-pope-leo-xivs-upcoming-digital-dialogue-with-young-people-nov-21-at-the-national-catholi.webp)
![CNA explains: Why does the Catholic Church prohibit ‘gay marriage’? #Catholic
null / Credit: Daniel Jedzura/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Nov 17, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Slightly over 10 years after it redefined marriage to include same-sex couples, the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 10 declined to revisit that controversial decision, upholding at least for now its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that made “gay marriage” the law of the land.A decade after that ruling, nearly a million same-sex couples in the U.S. are participating in what the law now defines as marriage. Yet the Catholic Church has continued to affirm the definition of marriage as being exclusively a union between a man and a woman. That has been the prevailing definition of marriage around the world for at least about 5,000 years of human history, though many societies have allowed polygamy, or multiple spouses, in various forms. The same-sex variant of marriage, meanwhile, only became accepted in recent decades. The Church has held since its beginning that marriage is strictly between one man and one woman. The Catechism of the Catholic Church directs that marriage occurs when “a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life.” It is “by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”Church Fathers and theologians from the earliest days of Catholicism have consistently upheld that marriage is meant to be a lifelong, permanent union between one man and one woman, with St. Augustine explicitly naming “offspring” as one of the blessings of marriage, along with “fidelity” and “the sacramental bond.”Gay marriage a ‘misnomer’ by Church teachingJohn Grabowski, a professor of moral theology at The Catholic University of America, told CNA that marriage in the Catholic Church’s teaching is based on “unity, indissolubility, and [is ordered] toward life,” or the begetting of children.“Those criteria can only be met in a union between a man and a woman,” he said. “They cannot be met in a union between two men and two women. ‘Gay marriage’ is thus a misnomer in the Church’s understanding.”The Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage, Grabowski argued, was an act of “judicial fiat” rather than a recognition of what marriage actually is. He said the high court was functioning more as a “cultural barometer” reflecting an erroneous shift in perception on what marriage is.“It would be similar to if the court passed a rule saying we could call a square a circle,” he said. “It’s just not based on the reality of the natural world.”The Obergefell ruling came after years of LGBT activist efforts to redefine marriage both within individual states and at the federal level. Advocates had argued that there was no meaningful reason to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples and that to do so constituted discrimination. Many critics have claimed that the Church’s broader teaching on marriage actually left the door open for same-sex couples to marry — for instance, they argued, by allowing opposite-sex couples to marry even if one or both of the spouses are infertile, the Church implicitly divorces biological childbearing from marriage itself. Grabowski acknowledged that the Church does allow infertile couples to get married (and to stay married if infertility occurs at a later date). But he pointed out that the Church does in fact prohibit marriage for those who are impotent, or constitutionally incapable of intercourse. The key point for the Church, he said, is what St. John Paul II called the “spousal meaning of the body.” The late pope argued that men and women “exist in the relationship of the reciprocal gift of self,” ordered to the communion of “one flesh” of which the Bible speaks in Genesis. The Church’s teaching, Grabowski said, “is based on the natural law. It tells us that the way God designed us is for the good of our flourishing, both as individuals and as the good of society.”Though marriage advocates have continued to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision over the past decade, others have at times suggested a pivot away from directly challenging it at the legal level. In 2017, for instance, Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron affirmed his opposition to gay marriage but questioned “the prudence and wisdom” of attempting to legislatively outlaw it at that time. The bishop suggested instead that “personal witness and education” were better tools for the current political climate.Grabowski acknowledged that one “could say, realistically, the ship has sailed and the political question is dead.”“But that’s a political judgment,” he said. Catholics should not lose sight of the goal to reestablish correct laws on marriage, he argued.“In terms of something to hope for, pray for, and to the degree that we’re able to, work for it — that’s something Catholics should aspire to.”](http://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cna-explains-why-does-the-catholic-church-prohibit-gay-marriage-catholic-null-credit-daniel-jedzura-shutterstockcna-staff-nov-17-2025-0600-am-cna-slightly-over-10.webp)
![Religious sisters announce historic land return to Wisconsin Native American tribe #Catholic
LaCrosse, Wisconsin. / Credit: JTTucker/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Nov 7, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
A Wisconsin religious community says it has completed the first known instance of a Catholic group returning land to a Native American tribe, hailing it as a move made in the “spirit of relationship and healing.”The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration announced the transfer in an Oct. 31 news release on its website. The community is located in La Crosse, Wisconsin, near the state’s border with Minnesota.The sisters had purchased the land from the Lac du Flambeau Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe in 1966 and used the property for its Marywood Franciscan Spirituality Center.The sisters said they sold the property to the tribe for $30,000, the exact amount for which they paid for the land six decades ago. The modern sale price represented “just over 1% of [the land’s] current market value,” the sisters said.The bargain sale represents “the first known return of Catholic-owned land to a tribal nation as an act of repair for colonization and residential boarding schools,” the sisters said.“Today, the tribe’s reservation represents only a fraction of [its] traditional territories,” the news release said. “Rebuilding and protecting tribal land bases is vital to sustaining sovereignty — it restores the ability for self-determination, cultural preservation, and community development.” “A strong land base supports essential services, creates employment opportunities, and provides a foundation for long-term economic and social resilience,” the sisters said. Tribal President John Johnson hailed the sale as “an example of what true healing and partnership can look like.” “We are proud to welcome Marywood home, to ensure it continues to serve future generations of the Lac du Flambeau people,” Johnson said. The sisters said the retreat center was “facing challenges to its viability,” leading the community to “discern a future for the land” in line with its institutional priorities. In their press release, the sisters said they have also been in “a process of reckoning” with the history of St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School. The sisters administered the school in Odanah, Wisconsin, from 1883 to 1969.Critics in recent years have claimed that such boarding schools participated in the erasure of Native American culture. Others have alleged that significant clergy sex abuse took place at such institutions.The sisters on Oct. 31 said such schools were guilty of “separating children from their families, suppressing Native identity, and paving the way for the large-scale seizure of Native homelands.”“It was painful to address our complicity, but we knew it had to be done,” former community president Sister Eileen McKenzie said in the press release.Diocese of Superior Bishop James Powers, meanwhile, praised the transfer, describing it as “a tangible act of justice and reconciliation that flows directly from the heart of our Catholic faith.”The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration traces its roots to a group of Bavarian immigrants who traveled to Milwaukee in 1849 “intent upon founding a religious community to spread the Gospel among German immigrants.”The community has run hospitals and schools in Wisconsin and has also sponsored medical clinics and mission schools abroad.](http://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/religious-sisters-announce-historic-land-return-to-wisconsin-native-american-tribe-catholic-lacrosse-wisconsin-credit-jttucker-shutterstockcna-staff-nov-7-2025-0600-am-cna-a-wiscon.webp)
