Daily Gracelines - Lenten Journey with Mary - Day 17

Theme: Mary's sorrowing heart is the perfect "vehicle" to take us more deeply into the passion of Jesus, Our Lord.

Grace: I pray for the grace to enter deeply into the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

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In January this year I sat in my kitchen early one morning, bleary-eyed after a fractured night’s sleep. (And I’m using the term “sleep” quite loosely.)  The former night’s guilty parties, ages 2 and 5, lounged – in varied stages of consciousness themselves – on the couch, while I clutched a mug of coffee and scrolled through the day’s news stories.  Suddenly I was wide awake, as I came upon the headlines of several Catholic sites: “Pope says Motherhood is Martyrdom.”  Whoa.

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In 1995, I was nearing graduation as a student at the Franciscan University with a degree in theology when I learned about the tragic impact of the radical feminist movement in Beijing, China. My father was a lobbyist at the UN conference on Women in Beijing and I remember sitting on the floor of my dorm room as he told me with great concern about their move to redefine gender. I knew this was wrong, very wrong, and I wanted to find out more about what the Church, in her wisdom, had taught about authentic femininity.

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