Life just has a way of interrupting our plans, doesn’t it?
I wanted to get back to you yesterday with some of the details of the Women of Grace National Conference held in Sacramento, CA last weekend but as it turned out, the day seemed to have plans of its own and suddenly it was midnight and my task was left unaccomplished. Do you know what St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) had to say about just such occurrences in her life? She said:
“When night comes, and retrospect shows that everything was patchwork and much that one had planned left undone, when so many things rouse shame and regret, then take all as is, lay it in God’s hands, and offer it up to Him. In this way we will be able to rest in Him, actually to rest and to begin the new day like a new life.”
And so, beginning this “new day like a new life,” I now share with you about the Women of Grace National Conference.
Women Gather for Weekend of Grace
Nearly five hundred women gathered at Sacramento’s Hyatt Regency Hotel located across from the Capitol for the Women of Grace National Conference the weekend of September 19-21. The Conference was preceded by the Benedicta Leadership Institute for Women.
Presenters for the Conference weekend were Catholic journalist and UN watchdog, Mary Jo Anderson; Healing the Culture’s president, Camille Pauley; radio show host and Catholic journalist, Teresa Tomeo; founder and president of Real Love, Inc., Mary Beth Bonacci; Women of Grace founder and president, Johnnette Benkovic; and chaplain and theological advisor for Women of Grace and Living His Life Abundantly, Father Edmund Sylvia, C.S.C. EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo was the keynote speaker at the banquet dinner on Saturday evening.
The overarching message of the conference encouraged women to take back the culture of the day by infusing it with the gift of authentic femininity. Conference speakers not only underscored the culture’s areas of deficit, but offered women practical ways of imbuing those deficits with “a spirit of the gospel” to restore the temporal order according to the heart of God.
Women in all states of life and at all ages in life have much to contribute to the public square. As Arroyo said to banquet dinner attendees, women are the architects and artisans of society’s future.
Every woman can do much to “aid humanity in not falling.” Whether she finds her locus of influence in her parish, children’s school, professional organization, employment, or through the most important gift of raising her children to be God-honoring, woman has the capacity to change the present and the future. And our day and time desperately needs her womanly presence and influence.
Tomeo spoke to conference attendees about the media’s influence on public opinion and how to traverse “media murk;” Anderson anchored the women in a global perspective of woman’s needed influence, and why woman is God’s secret weapon for our day and time; Pauley instructed women to use the four levels of happiness as a strategy for problem-solving serious issues; Bonacci moderated the teen track and encouraged the young women to be a sign of contradiction by their determination for chastity; and through his homilies, Father Sylvia urged women to bring a Catholic worldview to the marketplace of ideas and solutions.
Benkovic told women to dig deeply into the reservoir of faith and divine union for perserverance and hope. Emphasizing the Blessed Virgin Mary as the exemplar for women, she encouraged participants to accept her maternal beatitude and “smite” the ideological “serpents” slithering through the culture of the day.
She also encouraged women to deepen their own spiritual lives by living a true devotion to Mary. “Entrust yourself to Mary,” she urged, “and she will lead you safely to the heart of Jesus.” She urged women to place all of their cares, concerns, sorrows, and contradictions into her Immaculate Heart and to find refuge there in the midst of the storms certain to come as we bear Jesus to the world.
CD’s of all the conference talks are available by contacting Living His Life Abundantly at 1-800-558-5452.
“I even believe that the deeper one is drawn into God, the more one must “go out of oneself;” that is, one must go to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.” — St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
