Conference for Catholic women strives to nourish the soul

By John Gleason

It’s billed as “a spa weekend for the soul.”

This year’s Catholic Women’s Conference, Engaging the Culture Through Christ Our Hope, co-sponsored by ENDOW and the Archdiocese of Denver, will strive to help women of all ages deepen their faith via inspiring presentations. 

ENDOW, which stands for Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women, is a Catholic educational program that brings women together to discover their God-given dignity and to understand their role in humanizing and transforming society.  ENDOW offers small study groups, conferences and retreats to cultivate faith, fellowship and formation.

The Oct. 17-18 conference will feature a wide variety of speakers including Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a priest of the Byzantine-Melkite rite of the Catholic Church.  A former lawyer and teacher, he is founder of the Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University of Notre Dame and co-founder of Pax Christi-USA, a Catholic organization that is committed to peace education.

Father McCarthy and his wife Mary are the parents of 13 children and grandparents of 10. In his keynote address, Father McCarthy will share a story involving his daughter Teresia Benedicta.
“She was named after a Jewish Carmelite nun killed at Auschwitz during World War II,” explained Father McCarthy.  “Edith Stein was a convert from Judaism who became a cloistered Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresia Benedicta. She died in the Auschwitz concentration camp on Aug. 9, 1942.  She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.”

In March, 1987, 2-year-old Teresia was taken to the hospital with spasms and loss of consciousness. She was diagnosed as having ingested 19 times the toxicity rate of Tylenol.  With each passing hour the news grew worse and the family was eventually told that the only hope was a liver transplant and that at best there was only a 50/50 chance of success because of the damage already done to the child’s body.

 “The next day we decided to pray to her namesake (Edith Stein) and got as many people as possible to pray for my daughter,” Father McCarthy said. “For two days we watched and prayed and finally on March 24, she’d come around to the point where the doctor wrote on her chart that she’d made a remarkable recovery.”

In 1992 Father McCarthy got a call from the Carmelite order asking that he appear at a tribunal to weigh the evidence of the event and determine if it was sufficient to be considered a miracle.
“There was testimony of medical personnel; anyone who was at the hospital and what they saw,” he said.  “After days of testimony and review, the case was then sent to Rome.”

It wasn’t until five years later that Father McCarthy then heard that Pope John Paul II had declared it a miracle and that Sister Teresia Benedicta would be canonized a saint.
On Oct. 11, 1998, Father McCarthy concelebrated the Canonization Mass of St. Edith Stein with Pope John Paul II.

“I was very proud and honored to be a part of this celebration,” he said.

Other keynote speakers at the ENDOW conference include Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., who will speak about living the Catholic faith in the public square; Eileen Love, writer and speaker who will talk about “‘Humanae Vitae’: 40 years later,” and seminary professor-author Sister Prudence Allen, R.S.M., who will speak on “The 20th Anniversary of ‘Mulieris Dignita-tem’: Engaging the Culture through Education.  The conference will also offer a teen track led by Kate and Brigid Sweeney on the subject of “True Beauty Revealed.”

The conference will be held Oct. 17-18 at the Marriott City Center, 1701 California St., Denver.