priests

A month-long Vatican summit has ended with a call for women to have more leadership roles in the Catholic Church, but not a call for women to be ordained as priests, as some progressives had hoped at the start of the process.

Currently the Catholic Church only allows men to become deacons - ordained ministers who can officiate baptisms, weddings and funerals but not mass, unlike priests.

Liberation theology became particularly controversial when priests who followed a radical strand of liberation theology joined revolutionary movements such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who overthrew the dictatorial government of the Somoza family.

Sehri writes that her father was also influenced by the selfless lives of the Jesuit priests and nuns under whom he studied during his school and college years.

But his legacy was obliterated after it was revealed that he supervised the reassignment of numerous priests who admitted to or were accused of molesting young children.