USCCB after 9 killed in San Jose shooting: “Something fundamentally broken in our society”

Nell O’Leary, managing editor of Blessed Is She. / Therese Westby

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Feb 3, 2022 / 11:01 am (CNA).

When Nell O’Leary sat down with her team to brainstorm a new book for Catholic women, she said they felt drawn to the theme of “identity.”

“This one kept coming back, this idea of identity, of who we are as Catholic women, made in God’s image and likeness,” O’Leary, the managing editor of Blessed Is She, told CNA. This identity, she said, gets battered by the world “with all these lies that you are what you look like, you are your social media following, you are how successful you are, you are how many kids you have.”

Instead, O’Leary says, every woman is unconditionally loved as a “beloved daughter of God.”

This message is central to Made New: 52 Devotions for Catholic Women, a weekly devotional released in December. The book houses personal stories from five writers associated with Blessed Is She (BIS), a “sisterhood” of Catholic women who desire to grow in their faith through prayer and community. Each of the five — O’Leary, Leana Bowler, Brittany Calavitta, Jenna Guizar, and Liz Kelly — focus on a theme under the umbrella of identity: beheld, belong, beloved, believing, and becoming. 

While their stories are different, their tone is consistent. Each writer engages the reader with the frank, casual tone of a friend who’s honest about her struggles, hopeful for the future, and, well, confident in her identity.

“I invite you to journey with me, dear sister, to walk through the next fifty-two weeks as we rediscover our value, our worth, and our identity in Our Lord’s eyes,” Guizar, the founder of BIS, writes in the book’s opening. “He is waiting for you and me, and He desires to be in relationship with us. All it takes is a response to His call: yes.”

Each week begins with a short reflection or personal story from one of the writers and concludes with a scripture passage and two questions for the reader to ask herself. Along the way, artwork interrupts the text to greet readers with dusty, muted colors and shapes. The rose-gold cover impresses a feminine touch, along with a pink ribbon bookmark. Leaves and plants adorn the pages, suggesting growth and life made new. 

A saint’s calling

If readers come away remembering one thing, O’Leary wants them to believe and remember that “there’s no one way, cookie-cutter way, to become a saint.”

“God is calling you personally, through the circumstances in your life, through the challenges, through the blessings, to grow in holiness in who you are and where you are,” she said. “And to compare yourself to other women and feel like you can’t measure up is simply not where you want to put your energies.”

Instead, she said, God is calling each woman — in her particular, unique life — to become a saint. 

Every woman is different, something that the five writers themselves demonstrate. According to O’Leary, they are not all just a “bunch of young moms.” One struggles with infertility, another married later in life, one started a family before marriage, and another has no children.  

“I think that however old the reader is, they will find part of their own story,” O’Leary said. “When we write [our stories], we want the reader to actually be able to contemplate and ponder… to kind of find their own story. So you’re not just consuming another person’s content, you’re actually looking at yourself too.”

One story particularly moved O’Leary (even though she compared picking her favorite to “picking a favorite flower”). She pointed to writer Liz Kelly, who shares with readers her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis toward the end of the book.

While Kelly originally “thought that meant her role would become really small,” God “used her in that time and in that diagnosis to broadcast his message even further than she thought,” O’Leary summarized. 

She added, “I think the reason I love that story so much is because where we see limitations, God just sees more opportunities for grace.”

Unconditional love

A theme in the book that O’Leary herself touches on is God’s unconditional love — that he loves you as you are right now, regardless of what you do or don’t do, regardless of how your family or friends treat you, regardless of your past or future. He loves you.

“I suppose people in general struggle with the idea of unconditional love because it’s so rarely manifest in our human interaction,” O’Leary said of accepting God’s love. “And so, because the human level of relationship in our lives are fraught with other imperfect people, to really trust in and experience God’s love takes this trust and this faith.”

Her first piece of advice for women who doubt God’s love or think they aren’t good enough is to visit the confessional.

“Get all those embarrassing sins off your chest,” she said. “The priest has heard it all … you can go behind the screen.”

“It’s nothing that’s too embarrassing to bring to the sacrament and really unload yourself of the burden of all those sins and experience God’s grace filling you,” she added. God’s unconditional love can get “so shrouded and clouded by my own, my own humanity, my own mistakes, my own sinfulness.”

Community and Covid

Another topic in the book — and a priority for Blessed Is She as a whole — is community. O’Leary addressed the challenges of community, particularly during the pandemic.

“Living in a global pandemic, so many things being more online, we just see that highlights reel…those drive those envy twinges of, ‘Her life looks perfect. She doesn’t have my struggles,’” she said. “Really puts in wedges in our sisterhood and we need our sisterhood.”

“When we can’t be together, it just starts to look like everyone has it together,” she added. “We don’t.” 

O’Leary advised women to read the free daily devotions offered by Blessed Is She. And delete social media apps off of their phones, even if just for the weekend.

“I know that our phones and the internet are wonderful for connecting us, but they’re also really toxic for making it feel more lonely,” she said. “Live the life that’s in front of you.”

The personal 

O’Leary talked about her personal life and her own struggle with identity. The fourth of five children, she said she grew up surrounded by high-achieving parents and siblings. While she thought that one day she might have a family, she worked toward becoming an attorney. She ended up marrying her “law school love” and worked as an attorney. Then, she became a stay-at-home mom. 

“Realizing that I had hung so much on my identity being what I did, and what the world could see and applaud, that becoming a mom and then eventually staying at home with our kids,” she said. “It’s such a hidden life.” 

“The children are not cheering you on, ‘You did a great job!’ there’s no affirmation, there’s no feedback other than the deep satisfaction I guess, that no one went to the ER,” she added.  

The experience changed her.

“What I realized that I had to have a big mentality shift from, I’m not what I do and I’m not what I accomplish and I’m not even how my children behave,” she said. “That really, in these hidden moments in prayer with God, to say, ‘I know I’m your beloved daughter. I know I’m made in your image and likeness.’”

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null / Credit: Juanje Garrido/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, May 31, 2024 / 13:30 pm (CNA).
Tennessee has enacted a law making it illegal for an adult to take a child 17 or younger out of the state for gender transitioning without the permission of on… […]

Denver Newsroom, Oct 21, 2020 / 06:01 pm (CNA).-  

Archbishop Jose Gomez has rebuked an online claim that he plans to vote for Joe Biden in the November presidential election, stating that an alleged conversation in which he disclosed his voting plans never actually took place.

“In all my years as a priest and a bishop, I have never publicly or privately endorsed a political candidate or told anyone who I might be voting for. It is disgraceful that some would use the media to spread misinformation and try to confuse and divide people,” Gomez, the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, said in an Oct. 20 statement.

Cleanthechurch.com, a website based in California, published a blog post Tuesday evening which alleged that in February 2020, Gomez and a “wealthy ex-donor to the church” met over breakfast at the Jonathan Club in downtown Los Angeles.

The blog post claimed that Gomez told the individual that he is “voting [for] and supporting Jose [sic] Biden because he did not ‘like the way Trump talks.’”

“[T]he president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is voting for a pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage, socialist because he “does not like the way Trump talks”…. I am sure that he is also forcing priests in the archdiocese to support Biden… So infuriating!” the blog reads.

Gomez denied the alleged conversation, and even the breakfast, ever took place.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese told CNA on Wednesday that the archbishop had no breakfast meetings on his calendar during the month of February.

In his statement, Gomez urged Catholics to pray and reflect on the U.S. bishops’ voting guide, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility.”

Since 2007, the bishops of the United States have issued the “Faithful Citizenship” document to help Catholics decide how to cast their vote; it was most recently updated in 2019.

“And let us pray for the grace to treat one another as brothers and sisters, with dignity and respect,” Gomez concluded.

The “ex-donor” who made the claim against Gomez plans to release an affidavit doubling down on his claims, based on an alleged audio recording of the conversation, according to John Paul Norris, one of the founders of Cleanthechurch.com.

According to Norris, the accuser, who has declined to be named publicly, had— before the alleged February conversation— been meeting with Gomez at least once a year, and was a significant donor to the archdiocese.

“Everyone in the diocese knows him very well,” Norris told CNA.

Norris told CNA the accuser has an audio recording of the alleged conversation with Gomez stored on his cell phone, but has no plans to release it to the public. He said the recording includes Gomez stating that if Biden earns the Democratic nomination for president, Gomez would vote for him “because he’s Catholic.” 

In 2019, Norris was removed from the Los Angeles cathedral after confronting Gomez about Cardinal Roger Mahony and the McCarrick scandal.

Norris’ blog post this week was appended to a petition on Change.org, which Clean the Church created in 2018, calling for criminal prosecution of Mahony, who led the Los Angeles archdiocese from 1985 to 2011. Mahony has faced scrutiny for his handling of the sexual abuse crisis during his tenure as archbishop of Los Angeles, and been accused of covering up serial acts of abuse.

The petition calls on all of Los Angeles’ bishops to “act now or resign from their posts.”

Norris also told CNA his group suspects the archdiocese has cut a “deal” with vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Despite a history of public anti-Catholic bias on Harris’ part, Norris said he believes Gomez favors the Biden/Harris ticket because Harris appeared unwilling to prosecute Cardinal Mahony when she was district attorney in LA.

“She may be anti-Catholic faith, but she’s certainly a defender of the prelates, of the clergy,” he contended.

Norris offered no evidence of a “deal” regarding Mahony, and admitted that allegations of one are likely to remain unproven.

Joe Biden, a Catholic, has in recent months doubled down on his support for legal abortion.

In July, the pro-abortion group NARAL endorsed Biden for president, just over a year after the group issued a scathing statement demanding he reverse his support for the Hyde Amendment, which bars taxpayer funding for abortions. Biden withdrew his decades-long support for the Hyde Amendment and announced in 2019 he was opposed to the policy.

This month, Biden repeated his pledge to codify a right to abortion into federal law should the Supreme Court overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Norris said his group believes that Gomez is not strong enough in his public pro-life statements.

The archbishop has, however, written frequently in recent years about the “preeminent” importance of ending legal protection for abortion.

“Among the evils and injustices in American life in 2016, abortion and euthanasia are different and stand apart. Each is a direct, personal attack on innocent and vulnerable human life,” Gomez wrote in the foreword for a book on Catholics’ responsibilities in the public square.

“Abortion and euthanasia are ‘fundamental’ social issues because if the child in the womb has no right to be born, if the sick and the old have no right to be taken care of, then there is no solid foundation to defend anyone’s human rights, and no foundation for peace and justice in society.”

Earlier in 2020, the USCCB issued a letter, approved by the bishops, re-presenting the “Faithful Citizenship” document along with a series of short videos. In that letter, the bishops, led by Gomez, identified abortion as the “preeminent priority” for Catholic voters “because it directly attacks life itself.”

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