SAN ANTONIO • If you are a woman and overdue for a spiritual checkup, check into the Catholic Women’s Conference (CWC) sponsored by The Pilgrim Center of Hope, Sept. 21-22. Taking place at the St. George Maronite Center, 6070 Babcock, this gathering offers an opportunity for women to learn, be healed, receive encouragement and acquire the tools to fully live their God-given vocation as women.
    “ The CWC is like a ‘spiritual haven’ or perhaps, for some, a ‘spiritual hospital,’ said Mary Jane Fox, co-founder and director of the Pilgrim Center of Hope, referring to it as “a time to remove all the junk, heartaches from our lives — at least a beginning process — and to be touched by the Divine Healer, Jesus our Lord.”
    A line-up of inspiring speakers will fill the two-day conference, with Archbishop José H. Gomez celebrating the 8:30 a.m. Mass on Saturday. Leading off that day will be gifted author, teacher, wife and mother, Michaelann Martin of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).
    She is author of Woman of Grace: A Bible Study for Married Women, co-author of the Catholic Parent Book of Feasts: Celebrating the Church Year with Your Family and, with husband Curtis Brown (founder of FOCUS), co-wrote Family Matters: A Bible Study on Marriage and Family.
    The couple received the papal Benemerenti Award for exceptional service to the Catholic Church in 2005, nominated by Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM, of Denver, and reside in Greeley, Colo., where they are expecting their eighth child.
    Martin’s story is an all too familiar one. Raised a Catholic, her parents assumed she had received a good grounding in the faith since she had attended Catholic school, but after going off to college and being confronted about her beliefs, she drifted away from the Church, eventually becoming an evangelical Protestant.
    “I really feel it’s God’s grace that Our Lady brought me back to Jesus in the Eucharist,” she said. This grace also led her to a priest who could answer her foundational questions on Catholicism, leading to her re-conversion.

    “I meet a lot of fallen away Catholics who have not come back,” she noted, “who walk the same path I did. And they are just looking for the truth, looking for answers.”
    Through FOCUS, now in its ninth year and at more than 30 colleges and universities in the United States, the Martins (as part of the 130-strong FOCUS staff) help students discover the church’s history of salvation through Bible studies, catechism classes and fellowship activities. Martin relates that not only are Catholics being renewed in their faith, but non-Catholics are being converted as well, and FOCUS has been responsible for 106 vocations to the priesthood and 35 vocations for women to religious life.
    Martin will speak at the CWC on “Embracing the Gift: Living As Awesome Daughters of God,” encouraging women in their special role as daughters of God and offering guidelines on how to live in a culture that does not understand authentic femininity and godliness.
    “I think our young women especially have lost their sense of dignity,” she said, noting she will bring out some of the beautiful points that Pope John Paul II highlighted in his letter on the vocation and dignity of women.

    The second speaker Saturday will be Mother Nadine Brown, founder of the Intercessors of the Lamb, a growing community based in Omaha, Neb., whose scope is international. Consisting of sisters, brothers, priests and lay persons, their mission is to teach the powerful ministry of intercession. Mother Nadine is the author of numerous books, tapes, CDs & DVDs, including God’s Armor and Interceding With Jesus.

    Raised a Protestant, her original career as a flight attendant started her on a search for God as she observed the “smallness” of the world and the infiniteness of space from an airplane window. Feeling something was missing in her life, she began contacting the various churches in her hometown of Omaha, her last appointment being with a Catholic priest. After chatting briefly with him, he told her, “Everything’s going to be alright.”
    And it was. She went back for twice-weekly classes in the Catholic faith and was baptized that Christmas Eve, which she describes as “the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life.” The next day, when her father came to town for Christmas and learned of her conversion, he disowned her.

    Heartbroken, she first struggled with continuing in her new faith, but overcame that and was counseled by the priest who baptized her not to send the angry letter to her father she had prepared. Instead, he advised her to “pray your heart out.” “That’s where I really learned intercession,” said Mother Nadine. Eventually she and her father were reconciled.
    Three years later she entered a cloistered order, where she remained for 16 years before answering the call to found the Intercessors of the Lamb — a call not at first clear to her, but for which Jesus supplied the answers to the many daunting questions she faced.

    Mother Nadine’s topic for the CWC will be: “The Reality of Spiritual Warfare & the Sacramental Life.” “I teach right away that Satan is real,” she said, “and those fallen angels that went
with him.”
    To combat this very real evil, she relates, there is the power of prayer and sending the Holy Spirit. “The Lord has shown us,” she adds, “that our sacramental system in the church is our tremendous weapon to come against this enemy.”
    Regarding the CWC, she notes that women are more in touch with their heart, making it easier for them to connect with God. “It’s not quite that long a journey from our head into our heart,” she said.     “We get there a lot faster — and God is all heart.” She adds that Pope Benedict XVI has said, “I want to bring the church from her head, back into her heart.”

    Saturday speaker Colleen Carroll Campbell is an award-winning journalist and currently a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her Faith and Culture show on EWTN grapples with some of the most contentious social issues of the day, and her skillful journalistic work has included successfully exposing corruption. She resides in St. Louis, where she continues to write a weekly op-ed column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
    Her book, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, drew the attention of the White House, leading her to interrupt work on her doctorate in philosophy in 2003 to join President George W. Bush’s staff as one of six speechwriters.

    There she worked with the president on such domestic policies as the faith-based initiative, education, life issues and judicial appointments, as well as the global AIDS policy on the international level. “It was a lot of those issues where faith seemed to most directly intersect with political questions,” she notes.

    Campbell’s topic for the CWC is “Recovering the Feminine Genius: Principles of an Authentic Catholic Feminism.” “What I’ll be speaking about,” she says, “is related to the late Pope John Paul II’s call for a new feminism, one that promotes and protects human life and draws on what he called the feminine genius for defending the weak, for promoting life and for really humanizing civilization in the sense of making our world more humane and more respectful of the rights of all people.”

    While the pope felt the goals and accomplishments of secular feminism were laudable, notes Campbell, he believed it had “gotten off track,” especially regarding the abortion question. Her talk will include ways to live out the new feminism Pope John Paul described.
    She also plans to touch on the philosophy of St. Edith Stein, known as Sister Benedicta of the Cross, who served as an inspiration to Pope John Paul in developing his theology of the body and writing on women. “I’ll be talking too about how her ideas complement his,” said Campbell, “and can also have real, practical consequences for women trying to figure out how to live their Catholic spirituality in this day and age.”

    Rounding out the CWC Saturday speakers will be Father Jan Klak and Father Mary David Hoyt, FJ. Father Klak, originally from Poland and currently spiritual director to Assumption Seminary and a philosophy professor there and at Our Lady of the Lake University, will speak on “Direction in Discerning the Will of God in Our Lives.”
    Father Hoyt, a brother and priest of the Congregation of St. John in Laredo, will discuss “Power of Prayer Through Contemplation and Adoration.” He began his formative years as a brother in France, where he spent seven years in the congregation’s house of philosophy and theology.
Addressing attendees on
    Friday will be Martha Fernández-Sardina, director of the Office for Evangelization of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, speaking on “Feeling Angry the Christian Way.”