Chicago, Ill., Jan 8, 2018 / 11:50 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The love of God the Father is an inexhaustible source of fulfillment for the human heart, Sr. Bethany Madonna of the Sisters of Life said Thursday at a Catholic youth leadership conference in Chicago.
“So many blessings are coming at us at every second of every day,” Sr. Madonna said Jan. 4 to an audience of approximately 8,000, “and the source of each and every one of these blessings is the blessing the Father gives me with himself.”
Sr. Madonna gave one of the keynote speeches on the third day of the Student Leadership Summit, an event hosted biennially by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students which aims to train young people to be effective evangelists. The theme selected for this year’s conference, which ran January 2-6, was “Inspire & Equip.”
Sr. Madonna is vocations director for the Sisters of Life, a New-York based religious order founded in 1991 by the late Cardinal John O’Connor. Much of their ministry centers around aiding pregnant women and providing healing to those who have had abortions.
“Help us to receive the Father’s love anew, more deeply than we’ve ever received it before,” Sr. Madonna prayed at the start of her talk.
Sister Madonna told the story of a couple named Matt and Lucy, friends of the Sisters, who found out shortly before their wedding that Matt had been diagnosed with cancer and had been given a year to live. The two cancelled their honeymoon in order to begin treatments.
Around the end of Matt’s treatments, doctors urged Lucy to abort their newly conceived child, fearing anomalies due to Matt’s chemo.
Instead, Matt and Lucy “began to pray,” trusting in God. In the end, she said, the only anomaly the child was born with was that two fingers were fused to the palm in such a way that his hands formed the sign for “I love you” in sign language.
“It was remedied with a simple surgery, but Matt and Lucy received it as a message from their Father, brought to them through a son, the Gospel in miniature,” Sr. Madonna said.
However, even in the cases of great defects at a child’s birth, “the Father is saying, ‘I love you’ even more.”
She highlighted the uniqueness of the Father’s love, saying it makes for a relationship like no other. This love “goes to the extremes, indwelling.” She emphasized that only mortal sin can separate human beings from this love.
“When we sever ourselves like this, he holds onto our blessing, and awaits our return,” she said, referencing the parable of the prodigal son.
She told the story of Dr. Michael Brescia, whom the Sisters of Life honored this year with their annual Cardinal O’Connor award. Brescia developed a treatment for kidney disease in 1966, paving the way for the development of ongoing dialysis. Brescia was offered $1 billion to keep his discovery a secret for one year while a patent was developed.
She related a conversation Brescia had with his Italian immigrant father at the time. Brescia’s father, she said, was overcome with joy to know that 50,000 lives a year could be saved by his son’s discovery, but was dismayed to hear of the delay Brescia had accepted.
“‘Don’t think of this world,’” she said Brescia’s father urged. “‘You would let 50,000 people die?’”
Brescia published his discovery the next day. Sr. Madonna said that despite the invention now being worth $60 billion, he never gained anything from it financially. However, “he’s the richest man I know,” she said.
“Lasciare,” she said, using the Italian word for “release” or “let go” that Brescia’s father had spoken to him in urging his son to give up the discovery. “We too have to let go of so many things,” she said, “that keep us from the blessing that is ours.”
Referencing the “discernment of spirits” developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, Sr. Madonna said that “so often, we hand desolating thoughts and lies a microphone, and we set them on the stage of our hearts.”
“It’s like, ‘Wow, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard about myself. Say it again, just this time in surround sound,’” she said.
“Let these thoughts be taken captive,” she urged listeners.
She told a story from a sister in Romania who had worked at an understaffed orphanage, where babies had stopped crying because there was no one there to respond.
“There are places in our hearts that have not yet cried out to the Father because of a lack of faith,” she said. “We have a good Father, and he hears you.”
“Tonight, we break the silence,” she said, as FOCUS staff prepared the stage for adoration.
Speaking to CNA after her talk of how she herself first came to deeply encounter this love, Sr. Madonna told a story of time she had spent praying with the book of Genesis.
“I had a powerful meditation with the the Scripture of Jacob and Esau receiving the blessing of their father,” she said. In this story, Jacob dresses as Esau to receive his father’s blessing. “Sometimes, I feel like I have to dress up, or be someone else, or impress, or pretend, so that he can bless me.”
“Something happened in my heart where I realized basically how sorrowful that is, how far that is from what the Father is actually offering me,” Sr. Madonna stated. “Through the prayer, I felt like the Father wanted my empty hands, and wanted my heart as it is.”
Speaking to CNA on the connection between accepting God the Father’s love, the focus of the SLS conference, Sr. Madonna said that this love changes how we view those we encounter.
“Once we’ve received our own lives as a gift, and once we recognize that every human person is made in the image and likeness of God and is a communication of him,” Sr. Madonna told CNA, “when I encounter another person, I recognize that they were brought into being by God all-mighty, and are beloved of him. He loves them. They are communicating something to me that was actually entrusted to them by him and it’s unique.”
“When I know that, and live it, then every person is going to know that they’re special, they’re worthy of my time. I desire to know their hearts and be with them in solidarity.”
“We have to tell people; we have to invite them.”
Speaking to CNA on how this evangelization of the Father’s love relates to the work of the Sisters of Life, Sr. Madonna drew on the Blessed Mother.
“When we receive Jesus, and we allow him to be conceived in our hearts as she did at the Annunciation, and then when we go out, like the Visitation, and we meet these women who are pregnant, we hope that, just like John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb, we hope that something would leap in these women, that they would recognize Christ come to them, that they would experience this joy, the Holy Spirit, coming upon them.”
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Though Islam refers to itself as “The Religion of Peace”. serenity and tranquility seem to allude it too often. The news of the day gives a different impression as to the claims!
Muslims that have converted to Christianity are outstanding representatives of the Christian faith. Praise God for their testimony.
Psalm 119:165 Great peace have those who love your law; nothing can make them stumble.
Psalm 34:14 Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.
Psalm 29:11 May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!
Psalm 4:8 In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
James 3:18 And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
Blessings for Rushdie and for all Muslims that they too come to the un-surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ.
About the novel, “Satanic Verses,” this further explanation of its origin: “The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt. The part of the story that deals with the ‘satanic verses’ was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari” (Wikipedia).
Even the very first biographers wrote long after Muhammad, the first about one hundred twenty years after his death: Ibn Ishaq (704-773 A.D.). The only version of this lost work was edited by Ibn Hisham (d. 835 or 840), a full two centuries after Muhammad, and translated into English by A. Guillaume only in 1955 (“The Life of Muhammad”. Oxford University Press, 800 pages of small print).
The “satanic verses” in the Qur’an refer to a visit Muhammad (as the revolutionary monotheist) is said still to have made one night to a pagan temple. The triad goddesses are the offspring of Allah and his wife. Charged with hypocrisy, Muhammad immediately regretted the one-night relapse and unambiguously clarified the distance between Allah alone and the paganism of Mecca.
Related to which, Muhammad’s understanding of the Triune Oneness is distorted by the cultural imprint that the Christian Faith is only a (pagan-like) triad. And, further, the error identifies the triad as God, Jesus (under Islam, a prophet rather than “the word made flesh”), and Mary (there is no Holy Spirit).
Muslims do not read the Bible, because they know (!) that under the Qur’an, as the final revelation (“the word made book”), all chronologically earlier scriptures—both Jewish and Christian—are corruptions of Islam as the definitively-restored natural religion.
I’m starting to think of Francis not as a new Luther but as a new Mohammed, seeking, in due course to erase all that preceded him. Of course he needs references to Christ from time to time, but essentially as a prop to confer an imaginary semblance of legitimacy for his agenda.
God bless you dear physicist and seeker of God’s truth.
Or, maybe not a new Muhammad, but a sprout from the same trunk of natural religion?
In olden times the Syrian scribes—forced converts to Islam—are thought to have inserted Christian references into the Qur’an, in order to make scavenger-hunt Islam more palatable. (Hold that thought…).
The Qur’an borrow from the Pentateuch, in part to endorse the “law of Moses,” but so far as I can find, explicit reference is made only to the first four (affirmative) commandments, and not to the (prohibitive) final six (thou shalt not…). The parallel, some would say, is with current distortions of moral theology, which celebrate works of charity and mercy while discounting the absolute moral prohibitions as steadfastly affirmed (rigid?) in the Catechism and Veritatis Splendor.
So, will the new super-dicastery of Evangelization peddle a generic Christianity unaccountable to the demoted “dicastery” for Doctrine of the Faith, or not?
And, does “fraternity”—-with all of its favorable meanings–also represent an accommodation like that of the Syrian scribes of the 7th and 6th centuries? But, instead of making Islam more palatable to past-Christians (as in the past), does the current trajectory render a diluted Christianity more palatable to a resurgent Islam? Is Hollerich’s synodal “scientific foundation” (for jettisoning sexual morality) simply a natural religion (tending toward a folk religion) like Islam but cross-dressed in modern clothes? Bishop Batzing in an open collar rather than a turban?
Osmosis works in both directions! Syrian-Islam and post-Christian Catholicism, both, as natural religions? No longer convinced, or forthright, or proclaiming (different from proselytizing), or even articulate about the divinely-revealed and gifted life of supernatural grace?
7th and 8th centuries.
Seriously Edward J Baker? How do you extrapolate a judgement of Pope Francis from this article or is it that you have to negate our Pope as some badge of belonging to right thinking?…..
“Of course he needs references to Christ from time to time, but essentially as a prop to confer an imaginary semblance of legitimacy for his agenda.”
……if you alone say so!
In 1989, I, being a callow college student, was predicing that shocking and barbaric crimes like this one would surely knock some sense into the thick-skulled liberals who congregate at such places as Chautauqua. They would surely demand immigration policies to keep such people as this fanatic out of the country. Alas, since that time, there have been many such incidents, some far worse than this one, and the open-borders lunacy on the Left has only become more extreme. As the title of James Burnham’s classic put it, liberalism is the suicide of the West.
And from Tony W, it’s the thick skulled liberals who cop some flack. Indeed they need some sense knocked into them! Observations and insights inspired by what? Chautauqua is not your style? Not mine either but I hardly see it as a contributor to the social/spiritual malaise you are attributing. It’s a big world after all. Somehow for many in the USA it’s getting terribly small?
Ok so lets think for a moment that you can have it your way. All the likes of Chautauqua are done away with. The Immigration policy now prevents all crazies
( Muslims, Aliens and others who encroach upon your national boarder i suppose ) are no longer a problem…. they are gone or only the nice ones remain. Your ‘Christian Nation’ has uniformity of doctrine from east to west, north to south. All people conform to ( your ) world view by some form of decree I suppose. The Christian world view according to the likes of you, because that is what it would be. Do you really think that would address ‘the human condition’ Jesus so clearly enunciated in his teachings as contained in the Gospels? Let your imagination run wild!
Salman has lived under terrible pressure for so many years. I Pray he recovers.