What's Happening

July 9, 2025, Adrian, Michigan – The Adrian Dominican Sisters and other congregations of women religious in Michigan and Indiana have launched a billboard campaign to share the Gospel message of love and care for others.

In Lenawee County, five billboards placed by the Adrian Dominican Sisters simply read, “Love is kind. – 1 Corinthians 13:4.” This message aligns with the Adrian Dominican Congregation’s commitment to help build the beloved community in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, hunger, and hate. 

The Congregation issued a public statement on April 7, 2025, urging all people to help build a beloved community among the American people in the face of the many dehumanizing executive actions and decisions of the Trump Administration. In the statement, the Adrian Dominican leadership prayed that “the goodwill characteristic of the American people of all faith traditions will call us to kinder, more compassionate, respectful, and generous ways of being good, caring neighbors to one another – and to all the other beautifully diverse peoples of the world’s nations, neighbors in our common Earth home.”

The billboards are located at U.S. 12 and Miller Road, U.S. 12 and Matthews Highway, M-50 and Matthews Highway, U.S. 223 and Sandy Beach Road, and U.S. 223 and Humphrey Highway.

Five other congregations are placing billboards with messages urging care and concern for people and planet, displayed in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan, and South Bend, Mishawaka, and Plymouth, Indiana. Participating congregations are Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters and Sisters of St. Joseph in Michigan and Sisters of the Holy Cross, Poor Handmaids, and Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in Indiana.

The leaders of the congregations collaborating on the billboard initiative are members of the regional coalition of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The association of more than 1,260 leaders of Catholic women’s religious congregations serves to further the mission of the Gospel by serving as a corporate voice for the most vulnerable and by promoting dialogue and collaboration among religious congregations and society. To that end, LCWR released “A Response from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious to These Times” in January 2025.  
 

May 9, 2025, Adrian, Michigan – “Oh, Sister, I’m not hungry for food. I’m hungry for talk. I’m hungry for somebody to listen to me. I’m hungry for somebody not to judge me.”

Those were the words of Dawn, a transgender woman who, in 1999, spoke to Sister Luisa DeRouen, OP, a Dominican Sister of Peace, asking for understanding and spiritual accompaniment. This conversation propelled Sister Luisa to move from her ministry with gay and lesbian people to ministry with the transgender population.

Sister Luisa spoke of this experience and what she has learned about transgenderism in her presentation, Ministering with the Transgender Population. Her April 30, 2025, talk – transmitted via Zoom to Weber Center on the Adrian Dominican Sisters Motherhouse Campus and via livestream – was one of a series of presentations offered by the Congregation’s Office of Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusion. 

Speaking to an audience that included Adrian Dominican Sisters, Sister Luisa began with her hope: “I hope I can give you language today so you can speak up for [people in the transgender population] with more suitable language. You may have transgender and nonbinary people in your families.”

Sister Luisa explained a new understanding of sexuality. “Being transgender is a neuro-biological issue,” she said. “It is a biological issue, not a moral or psychological issue.” She said five criteria determine a person’s sex: genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, internal genitals, and the brain. “For most of us, they all line up, but for transgender people, that is not the case,” she said. “Being transgender is for real. It’s a real condition, and transgender people need appropriate, professional medical care.”

Sister Luisa asked Catholic Sisters to be a helpful resource for the spiritual dimension of the lives of transgender individuals. 

“For trans people, the primary process is transitioning,” Sister Luisa said. “I walked with them through the transition, and who they are on the other side of the transition. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it’s a spiritual transition,” though one that’s experienced differently, and that entails different components for each person.

Sister Luisa spoke of the grace that’s available to transgender individuals when they go through transition – whether socially with a change in clothes or hairstyle or medically with hormones or surgery. Once they transition, she said, they often need to renegotiate every aspect of their lives, from relationships with family and friends to their jobs. 

“They’re in a liminal, unknown place – and that is the most profound place where we find God,” Sister Luisa said. “They experience the grace of God’s spirit – self-hatred turns to self-love …. They still have problems like we do, but they can deal with life’s challenges from a place of integrity and honesty and much deeper self-knowledge, knowing how precious they are to God.”

She addressed the issue of the use of hormone therapy for children, with many arguing that children don’t know who they are and that hormone therapy would not be right for them. Until last year, she said, children who believed they were transgender had to have parental consent up to the age of 18 for hormone treatment or surgery. That age has been changed to 16, she said.

Some arguments claim that “any kid can walk up and say they’re transgender,” Sister Luisa noted. “But the norm is to go slowly and very carefully” before prescribing hormone therapy or surgery. “If the child is persistent, consistent, and insistent for [only] six months, it doesn’t make the criteria” for transgenderism. “It’s judged case by case.” Some children might have been misdiagnosed. “There are not enough doctors trained well enough. But for the most part, transgender children are getting the appropriate care.”