A New Moment in the Life of the Church

Who was at the Eucharistic Congress just now? Was there, yeah. What’s so cool about the Congress is that only about 60,000 people were able to go. That’s a lot of people, but it was a moment in the church that people are already comparing to our World Youth Day moment of 1993, when Pope John Paul II was here. And what happened there opened up something in the church that we’re still living in.

It was clearly a moment like that. Everybody who was there could feel it. And we’re coming into the Summer Conference on the tailwind of that. There’s a particular anointing on what just happened in the church and what’s happening in the church, and I just kind of want to speak to that.

The Loss of Women Religious

I’m a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. I have a very bizarre assignment: I’m assigned full-time to the renewal of women’s religious life, and the only diocesan priest assigned to that work.

Basically, because my Archbishop — who is a great man, I love him deeply, Archbishop Jerome — got sick of me telling him the church has not done enough to take care of our women religious. And then, when we lost sisters, the church got really, really sick. And we’ve actually never recovered.

I was at a youth conference years ago — 2016, a Steubenville Conference. At the end of those conferences, you have this altar call moment where you invite any of the teens who had a powerful experience to come forward and receive a blessing if they’re open to a vocation.

I usually call the guys first, because guys in high school — it’s like pulling teeth. It’s hard to get them to do anything, especially to stand up and say they might want to be priests. But then I call the girls second.

When I called the girls forward, a third of the women at the conference rose up and came forward. High school girls — in front of boys, teachers, and their parents — saying they were open to a vocation. That was amazing to me in itself.

While I’m up there giving this exhortation about what they could do to discern, I’m scanning the room, trying to find any consecrated woman in the house to bring up. Like: “Can you talk to them? I’m a man, a priest — can you tell them what it’s like to discern religious life?”

I couldn’t find one. After a couple of minutes, I gave up. There was not a single consecrated woman in the entire house. And I realized the church in that local setting was not ready for what the Holy Spirit was going to do — to awaken in these hearts an openness to this vocation. The church wasn’t ready to walk with them.

I think that actually sums up how the church sits right now around the question of women’s religious life. Consecrated women — we all say, “I miss sisters, I want the sisters back.” But we don’t really have a game plan.

So I went home to my Archbishop and said, “Archbishop, I think we’re asleep at the wheel. God is calling these young women, but we don’t have sisters to walk with them. And the church isn’t really thinking about what it means to place sisters around these women so they can discern.” And he said: “Well, now it’s on you, Father.”

Renewal in the Church

I love the theme of renewal in the church. I love what God is doing. We saw a huge glimpse of it at the Congress. God clearly is awakening his church.

He’s doing it as the culture gets sicker and sicker. And we as a church — we’ve always been God’s answer to the sickness of the culture, but right now it’s becoming especially poignant.

We’ve got some tremendously beautiful things going on in renewal. We’ve got groups like Divine Renovation, Rebuilt, Forming Intentional Disciples, Amazing Parish, all these phenomenal groups. Strategic planning in dioceses. Even the USCCB is getting very good at planning well, mastering stewardship, projecting into the future.

But when you look across almost all of these formats for proposing renewal, typically there’s little to no account of renewing religious life. Very little account of the need to be solicitous for fostering vocations to our religious communities.

The Missing Piece

The dilemma I find is this: we have tremendous resources right now for the renewal of the church — the best we’ve had in history around discipleship and evangelization. They’re remarkable. They’re so effective. But they all live in the midst of an assumption.

They take a snapshot of the church today and say: “Okay, this is the church. Let’s make it work better. Let’s get better at preaching, teaching, evangelizing.” But the presumption is that this is the way the church is supposed to look today. That’s a faulty presumption.

When we look back at 1,974 years of church history — this is not the way the church is supposed to look.

So our best projects and programs typically aren’t accounting for an absent factor.

The Numbers

I was digging through CARA stats from 1965 onward. Starting in ’65, this is what the American Church looked like. A bulk of parishes in the U.S. were established in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s.

In that church, there were three sisters to one priest.

Now, priest numbers aren’t as bad as people think. We need vocations, yes, but right now we’re seeing a lot of really good men step forward. These men know what they’re giving up, and they’re choosing it. That’s not default. The same is true in women’s religious communities.

But here’s the dilemma: around 70–80% of sisters are age 80 or older. That means the number is going to slide way below the priest line before we bottom out.

Communities like the Dominicans, the Marian Sisters of Santa Rosa — they’re perfect counternarratives. They’re growing beautifully. The CMSWR, a gathering of major superiors of women religious, represents these growing communities.

But the mismatch is enormous. Everyone wants sisters — dioceses, bishops, schools — but the communities can’t keep up. One community told me they had over 400 requests for sisters to come. But they only receive 6–15 new women a year.

A Long-Term Vision

I get calls from all around the country: “Father John, help me get sisters in my diocese.” And I say: “Good luck. If you want sisters, start thinking about a solution now.” Because it’s more than a phone call and a waiting list.

Even with large grants — like one diocese that received $150 million for Catholic education — money can’t buy sisters. Women religious don’t grow on trees. It takes at least 10 years for a woman to discern, be supported, formed, and sent into mission.

Often in renewal, we’re too shortsighted. If we want to argue that women religious matter — more than just being workers — then we need to think in big, long timelines.

From 1965 to 2021, the numbers show a crazy slide. And the way we approach renewal often just accepts this reality as “normal.”

Adapting to the Loss of Religious Sisters

But what I just want to claim or explain to you—the thing that’s frustrating me—is that the way we approach getting things right in the Church and trying to renew the Church often doesn’t account for how we adapted to that massive decline when we started to lose the sisters.

The main apostolate of our living religious in the U.S. was running schools and running hospitals. Those are the teaching and the healing professions, which are vital to the survival of culture—to have healers and teachers, and specifically to have women who were given over to the Lord to be doing that work.

As soon as the sisters needed to start withdrawing from their apostolates, we started hiring their replacements. We started hiring administrators and teachers who could administrate and teach and who came from a Catholic ethos. They grew up around sisters. They lived the Catholic faith because we had a pretty robust Catholic culture in the ’60s and the ’70s.

So, for one or so round of hirings, it was fairly easy to replace. Second round of hirings: we were hiring teachers who grew up around teachers who grew up around sisters. Third round: there’s a dilution. It dilutes and dilutes and dilutes.

Today, my brother is a Catholic parish pastor, and when he has to hire teachers, he basically takes a pile of applications, reads through them, and very quickly can tell who’s going to Mass on the weekend. He sets those into one pile and sets the others aside. And it’s usually a very small handful of applicants for Catholic schools in teaching professions who are going to Sunday Mass. That’s where we are.

Building Expensive Infrastructures

What we’ve had to do around that is build up massive infrastructures to form and equip our teachers to be exactly what we need them to be—which is awesome, but it’s also rather expensive.

We built entire infrastructures around something that didn’t used to have to exist. Now we’re living in the midst of budgetary metrics and stewardship metrics—numbers that we’re chasing—that were never there back in the ’70s and prior.

So much of this good work to drive good stewardship and good discipleship, and to zero out our budgets, is based on a premise that this is how the Church is supposed to look—without taking into account the fact that our budgets are really heavy in no small part because we have massive staffs that we didn’t have before.

Now that can sound reductive, because it would be reducing sisters to cheap work. And sadly, at a certain point in our history, often we might have treated it that way. We saw sisters as convenient and cheap labor. But really, at our best, that’s not what it was.

We’ve never quite compensated for or really acknowledged what happened as we made that shift. Because it wasn’t actually just a functional shift. We looked at the system and said: we’re losing teachers, let’s get new teachers; we don’t have sisters, let’s get other people to step in that role. That’s a mechanical or functional solution.

It kept things running—and it’s going better than it could be, in many ways. We’ve got some tremendous initiatives in Catholic education right now that are working beautifully. But what we never accounted for is that you can’t actually just make a functional shift there.

In losing the sisters in the classroom and in the hospitals, we lost more than just a category of workers. We lost something that had a profound metaphysical impact.

The Metaphysical Sign of the Sisters

Metaphysics is just the study of things that you can’t grab and touch and see—they transcend material, physical realities.

What we lost when we lost the sisters was something much more important: something that points out an invisible reality that is actually one of the most important things to take account of.

When you read scripture and look at the story of God trying to win us for himself, the last thing that happens at the end of all time is there’s a wedding feast. The Church is the bride, and Christ is the bridegroom.

That’s a very abstract reality. As we try to figure out how to make our parishes and dioceses and apostolates work better, we’ve got to remember that we’re the bride.

I have no idea how to bring that into the boardroom. I have no idea how to talk about that in the average Sunday sermon. But the beautiful gift of consecrated women is that they make visible something that is ultimately vital and revelatory of the Church’s own inner nature. And they do something different than what the priests can do.

Marriage, Celibacy, and the Mystery of the Church

There’s a great passage in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that I’ve been obsessed with for a long time. It’s from the end of a section where Paul is talking about marriage and how men and women are supposed to relate.

At the end of going back and forth, trying to explain how men and women should relate in marriage, he finally almost gives up. He says: At the end of the day, what I’m talking about here is a great mystery. The mystery is a reference to Christ and his Church.

What that means is that marriage—fleshly marriage, the sacramental marriage of a man and a woman—is not actually the thing.

Sometimes we overemphasize marriage and make it seem like it’s heaven on earth—which is actually putting too much pressure on marriage. Marriage is supposed to be an icon or a sign of something more ultimate, which is the marriage of Christ and his Church.

In order to make that accessible, Christ gave us the celibate state—to skip over marriage and bring that ultimate thing down into the temporal order. Priests obviously are part of that story. We testify to the bridegroom. We stand in persona Christi. But we’re only half of the story.

The consecrated woman makes visible the very nature of the Church as bride. She makes concrete something that otherwise is such a mystery, but is central to our identity.

An Analogy from Yellowstone

Nature and supernature are closely related. What happens in the natural realm is often revealing to us things that happen supernaturally.

The best example of systems falling out of balance comes from the story of the wolves in Yellowstone. Back in the 1930s, ranchers around the park were losing cattle to wolves, so they hunted and killed all the wolves.

By the 1990s, conservationists realized something was missing. They reintroduced a small pack of wolves. As they did, everything in the park started to shift: elk moved, vegetation regrew, songbirds and small mammals returned, coyotes, foxes, and bears increased, beavers came back, and even the rivers changed course.

It’s called a “trophic cascade.” Take out what’s supposed to be at the top, and the whole system collapses.

The argument here is that the sisters are the wolves—not wolves in sheep’s clothing, but in the sense of holding a high place of priority in the ecosystem of the Church. When you pull that out, the whole thing has to adjust.

Yellowstone couldn’t say out loud, “Something’s missing.” But the Church has been able to feel that. Talk to anybody who grew up with sisters—they’ll say, “I miss the sisters. I wish we had sisters.”

It’s time to say: let’s not just be nostalgic. Could we actually do something about that? Would we be willing to envision, metaphysically, strategically, pragmatically, a future with women religious?

Dreaming Big for the Future

I was talking to Tim Busch, and I said: Tim, I think we’ve got to really start to say, let’s get back to that 3-to-1 ratio we had in the ’50s and ’60s.

But no—that’s too small. We’ve got to dream 10-to-1. Because we need more women religious than we need priests. We need consecrated women because they show us something priests cannot show us.

If we don’t decide to dream big, we’re never going to plan big. We’ll just talk big, and then walk out with basic plans and say, “I hope you bring us sisters, Lord.”

If we want to do more than just pray for that, we have to reboot an entire machine that ground to a halt 30–40 years ago. Because this generation of young people—and the one above them, like me, I’m 33—grew up without a single habited sister.

It wasn’t until I went to seminary that I was around Mother Teresa’s sisters, and I started to see them. As a priest, they drew something out of me that no other woman had ever drawn out of me. They made me want to be a better priest—and they continue to do that very thing.

So this idea of restoring, renewing, and expanding religious life—what it does is it benefits the priesthood. It’s not the prime reason, but it makes our priests holy. It calls the priests to a place that they currently aren’t.

The Church Without Mothers

A buddy of mine wrote an essay a few years ago about priests in the average setting in the Church acting like single dads. They’re trying to run parishes without a complementary “other.”

I was explaining this to another friend of mine who’s one of our supporters. It took me about an hour to explain the metaphysics, and he’s a marketing guy. He said: “Well, let me just get that down in one sentence for you. What I’m hearing is this: a church without religious sisters is like a family without a mother.”

And I was like: big—that’s exactly what it is.

The Limits of Programs and Mechanical Thinking

We’ve done beautiful things to help our priests grow. We’ve got to keep doing it. We need more vocations and better priestly formation. Our seminaries are in the best place they’ve ever been. But even with the best of all that, we’re still missing something if we don’t have the mom—if we don’t have the spiritual mother, she who is also a witness to the bride.

This is a great line from Pope Benedict back in 1986. He wasn’t even Pope then—he was Cardinal Ratzinger. He was explaining that the dilemma of the Church is a misunderstanding of herself, and the way that we’ve adapted our theology and even our strategies.

He points out the fact that the Church is not a mechanical entity, such that mechanical solutions are not solutions. If we just substitute and hire and try to fix things financially, we’re not treating the Church as she really is: a person, a woman, a mother—alive.

I love this. He said: The Marian understanding of the Church is the most decisive antithesis to a purely organizational or bureaucratic conception of the Church.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the question: Do we want to see the Church as a bureaucracy or as a bride?

If it’s a bureaucracy, let’s get really good organizational health—which we have to do, for sure. But if it’s a bride, then let’s recognize that God is attempting to express his love to all of humanity, and evangelization is meant to go out to the world and say: come into a love you don’t even know out there, a love you cannot find in the streets.

The Marian Dimension and Consecrated Women

If the Marian dimension of the Church is what reveals that, it’s the consecrated woman who puts a face to it. Because Mary matters—centrally, at the foot of the Cross. Pope Benedict says Mary is the whole Church.

But Mary can be abstract and hard to understand. She can be a painting or a sculpture. When you see her in the flesh—when you see a consecrated woman, who is something of a face of Mary—not perfect, but analogously in the way that I am something of the face of Christ—not perfect—you start to understand something.

You start to understand what it is to be cherished by, nurtured by, loved by the heart of a woman, which is meant to complement the love you receive from the heart of a priest.

And all of that, when it rebalances, enables marriage to be exactly what it’s supposed to be.

A Paradigm Shift, Not a Program

So this is a big proposal, guys. Because I’m not suggesting a program. I’m not suggesting getting right at X, Y, and Z methods to change things first.

I’m suggesting that we have to shift paradigms completely, and admit that many of the ways we are looking at renewal in the Church are framed by mechanical thinking. We’ve got to fight for metaphysical thinking. We’ve got to come back to the deep, abiding Marian reality of the Church—and then say: how might we do this differently?

So, I placed on your chair a prayer card. That’s the first thing I want to point out to you: we’ve got to leave with prayer.

I put two there. I ask you to give one away—at least be a missionary coming out of this talk. But we’ve got to believe that if what I’m saying is true, then it’s not me who came up with it. It’s the Lord who’s asking us to be invested in changing the way we do things as a Church.

That means God is speaking a new word into the Church right now—that he wants his Church to radiate. He wants a radiant bride who witnesses to his love.

That does not happen by better posters and better programs. Better posters and better programs arise from hearts that are inflamed with the truth. And the truth is: God is searching for, and in love with, a bride. He’s calling us to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

You and I—married laypeople, single laypeople, priests—we can only talk about that. But a consecrated woman shows it to the world.

Consecrated Women as a Living Witness

It’s why, when you go out in public—and I do a lot of work with sisters—just recently at the Congress, I walked around with a good number of sisters. Throngs of people come up to the sisters.

They come up to me for a blessing. They come up to me to hear their confessions. They come up to the sisters without even having a good game plan. Time and time again, they come up like: “Hi.” And the sister is like: “Hi.” That’s it.

Because they’re looking for that. They’re looking to be received, to be accompanied, to be built up and upheld in a way that only a woman can do. And a consecrated woman is particularly consecrated to be available to the Church in that way.

When you pull that out of the system, the whole thing shuffles and gets sick.

That’s why, while we get very good at renewal programs and all of our projects and plans, if we’re not accounting for this, no matter how well we propose X, Y, or Z, it’s never going to get to the way it’s supposed to be.

And that’s maybe a bold claim, but I’ll double down on it: the Church is never going to be renewed unless we decide to renew women’s religious life—the life of consecration for women. And that’s going to bless our marriages, it’s going to bless our priests, and it’s going to bless our world.

The Assault on Woman

Specifically today, when you look at the crisis of sexuality and gender in the world, there’s a way of reading the whole thing as a crisis of woman.

Woman has been under assault since the beginning. The curse that falls upon the serpent is enmity between her and the serpent. Eve was the one to fall first; Adam followed her.

The new Eve, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the one who ended the reign of Satan by her obedience and brought into being—by her “yes”—the Eternal Word of God. She generated him into her womb. Ever since then, woman has been the subject of the enemy’s rage.

When you look at the transgender crisis, it’s either men making a mockery of women—like drag men pretending to be women in that disgusting fashion—or women terrified of their femininity, trying to remove it surgically, tragically, in a distorted fashion. It’s woman who suffers the entire thing.

Which is why the consecrated woman represents such a profound answer to this question in the heart of society: What is a woman?

They’re going to look at the Church and see something of the teaching there. But when they see the bride personified—when they see the woman living in persona ecclesiae—they’re going to understand what a woman is.

You sisters—you consecrated women—are going to show us what a woman is, in a way that’s going to affect marriage, priesthood, the laity, the whole world.

Because this is just what the enemy has set out to destroy.

Holy Frustration and Urgency

So, what I’m proposing, actually, guys, is a movement in the Church. What we’re trying to do is awaken a movement in the Church that sees the renewal of the Church has to pass through the renewal, the healing, the expansion of women’s religious life.

And through that, the renewal of priesthood. Through that, the renewal of marriage. It’s all about the restoration of right order.

I don’t have time to get into all the specifics about what that entails. But I’ve launched an apostolate. Some of you know who Sister Miriam James is—she’s from the community called SOLT, the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity. They have generously assigned her to this work with me. She’s the executive director.

We’ve got a team of two lay women, and we’re growing. But we exist simply to advocate for this and to attempt to get the Church upset.

My mission—my goal—is to get the Church upset about the way things are.

I’m asking—I think this is being recorded, so apologies to the audience—I’m asking you to be pissed off. Because we didn’t do this right. We dropped the ball terribly a long time ago.

But it’s not too late to dream, and envision, and think very, very broadly.

What we see among these young women is the calling of God. At those conferences, time and time again, something is happening.

I went back to that conference in that same setting 5 or 6 years later, and rather than a third of the women, it was half the girls who came forward. That’s over the course of only 5 years. Something is happening there among our young women.

We’ve got these communities desperately in need of more sisters, so they can form them and send them out. The only way forward is for us, who are not in religious life, to say: how can we help you? How can we support you, sisters? What do you need from us—from our families, from our bishops, from our priests?

Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving

It’s more than just offering financial resources, but we’ve got to do that too. If prayer is the lead, from Scripture we know: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are the most powerful things Jesus asked us to do to move hearts, to show our repentance.

So, we’ve got to pray. I would beg you to pray that prayer. We’ve given about 10,000 of those prayer cards away over the last few months, just trying to get the Church praying for this.

But then, if you would, fast. Please, offer penitential sacrifice for the renewal of religious life and for the renewal of the Church.

And if you would, give alms to a religious community of your choice. Anyone, just start giving of your resources to communities, and let the almsgiving open your heart to God’s invitation to awaken a movement. God’s desire is to renew the church. Prayer, fasting, and giving are the key.

Rebooting a Culture of Vocations

Then we’ve got to reboot a culture of vocations, which is going to take a lot more work—but I’m on that. Just to share with you: for maybe a year now in Milwaukee, with my team, we’ve been working out a model for doing vocations work in the absence of sisters. Because we don’t—we don’t have sisters in habits in my diocese, with only a couple of exceptions.

So what we’ve been doing—and it’s been working—is sending three or four young women away each year to these growing communities around the country. It means we’re losing some of our best women, but we’re investing in the future here.

What we’re doing is finding basically a playbook that we’ll be able to lift up and drop anywhere else. We’ve run this for three years, and now we’re mentoring five different dioceses.

In those dioceses:

• In one place, we’ve got a priest who works with consecrated women.

• In another, a director of evangelization, a lay person in a diocesan office.

• In another, a group of consecrated women.

• In another, a parish staff person.

• In another, a lay woman in a parish with three kids.

Each of them approached us and said, “We want to figure out how to help the next round of religious sisters.”

I said, “Well, let’s walk together for a year. Here’s what I’ve been doing in Milwaukee. Would you help me refine it, clarify it, and articulate it so it can be done by anybody—by someone who doesn’t have money, doesn’t have experience, and doesn’t have sisters in their life—but still wants it to happen?”

So we’re working that out over the course of the next year. And then we’re just going to offer that to the church.

There’s no fee. There’s no subscription. Someone actually recently asked, “Can I subscribe?” I said, “Subscribe? There’s no subscription to this. This is just a burning heart that wants the church to wake up.”

There’s no financial structure here. With very little budget, we’re trying to build something that doesn’t require financial structures, but instead kindles hearts to be with the heartbeat of God and the same desire to see the church shine.

That will be finished in probably six to eight months. Then we’re going to give it to the bishops, to the superiors, and to every single parish and lay diocese we can find.

A Call to Rebalance the Church

So if you will get upset with me now, would you then be a person who goes home and talks about it? And even throughout this conference, would you just talk to everybody about the fact that, “Hey, you know what? We lost sisters. And maybe we didn’t even lose them—maybe we need them back. And there’s something we can do about it.”

Maybe there’s actually a group of people enabling a movement in the church to take better care of—and even drive solicitude for—the renewal of women’s religious life.

Maybe we could watch what it would look like for a church to rebalance, like the park had to rebalance. It might be a little ugly at first. It might confront some of the existing structures. We might even admit that the existing structures aren’t quite framed and built the way they’re supposed to be.

Not only would we be getting back something that was there—we’d actually be doing it in a brand new setting.

Because even in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, unfortunately, there still was a patriarchal society. There still was a gap, and the sisters weren’t treated the way they ought to have been.

But now we’re in a place—post-sexual revolution, post–John Paul II’s Theology of the Body—recognizing equal dignity, while also the distinction between man and woman.

We’ve never really seen a church filled with women religious, where men and women—priests and sisters—sit on the same plane with different tasks and duties.

We’ve never really seen what it looks like for women to lead properly—not necessarily always out front, but to have a voice on the podium, or behind the scenes, or anywhere else that they feel called by God to show us what it is to be claimed by the divine Bridegroom.

And we’ve not quite seen that.

And that I believe as the world crumbles and things begin to fall apart that is where God wants to take his church. So we can be indeed in this age his answer to the crisis of the culture not only that asks what is a woman but why does it matter that there’s a church and who is this God.

The Witness of Religious Sisters

Cardinal Oullet, a couple of years ago, was preaching to the MCs, and he said to them—sisters, these are Missionaries of Charity—he said, “Sisters, we need you. We need you because of a simple fact: no one marries a dead man. We marry Jesus, and we can’t see Him, but you walk around the streets in your bridal garb with a dress on and a veil. No one marries a dead man, and you’re in love with this man you married, and we can’t see Him. But when we see you, we start to see Him, and we start to know who Jesus is. I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m a priest, but you—she can.”

One last word for the priesthood: Cardinal Oullet, years ago, speaking to a community of clerics, said, “Sisters, the priesthood got sick when your sisters took off their habits because priests could no longer see the bride, and so they forgot who they were supposed to be as the bridegroom. The Church is sicker than we’ve ever been able to articulate, but the remedy is not as complicated as we often make it. It’s actually letting the things God has already given us grow from the roots and recognizing that, rather than just saying, ‘I miss sisters,’ we can say, ‘What are we doing about it?’”

The Renewal of the Church is Awakening a Culture of Vocations

“What we’re going to do about it,” he continued, “is awaken a culture to the fact that God still calls. It could be you, it could be your daughter, it could be your sister. And the Church has to be able to say, ‘That’s beautiful. I want that. I need that. How can I walk with you?’

We’ve got to set up encounters with young and vibrant communities—communities that are alive, that are showing vitality, that have all ages represented, but who are showing that this is a new thing in the Church, that God wants His women religious to radiate. Then we’ve got to be able to walk with these women. The paradigm, I won’t spend time with this, CU, I want to let you go, is awareness, encounter, and accompaniment. This is how we’re building a culture of vocations.

We’ve got to create, or awaken in the hearts of everybody, the awareness of God’s calling—the fact that He calls still, and He wants communities to grow and expand and really be everywhere. Only then do we set up encounters where these young women and these families encounter sisters who are really living in it.

They’re already aware that it could be a calling, they’re already aware that God wants to do this, and they’re already aware of how much it matters. After that, the Church has to learn how to accompany it again, because frankly many of us have forgotten how to do that. Many of us don’t know what it’s like to be around sisters, what it’s like to discern a calling, what it’s like to have this and that need. So it’s about rebooting a system that fell asleep a long time ago, but doing it in a way that has really never happened before.

My Personal Mission, No Sales Pitch

I can’t spend any more time on this. This is a topic that animates my heart. I’m with my team trying to awaken a movement in the Church. This is our website, and there’s no sales pitch, there’s no fundraising.

I don’t need money—in fact, I don’t want money. I hate that when we put money on things in the Church, they start to dry up, build big, and then die. Money kills a lot of things in the Church. So I don’t really want money. I’m going to need money eventually, but I’m not asking for it. I don’t want it because I want to stay vital and free at the service of God.

I want people who are upset and willing to fight for it, who are going to pray, fast, give alms, hit their knees, and offer sacrifice. And I want to watch God then do the work. I see myself just as a hidden instrument to a renewal that I believe in. In 10 and 20 years, we’ll all be able to look at each other and say, ‘Hey, I’m a friend of the Bridegroom.’

Because what a friend of the Bridegroom does is point out Jesus and say, ‘Do you know how good He is? Do you realize He’s called you to marry Him?’ And as soon as He approaches, the friend of the Bridegroom gets out of the way and allows Jesus to take over. This entire movement has to awaken the hearts of young women, but also the whole Church, to realize that that’s who Jesus is. And we call all—all—to be His friends.

Please take those cards. I’ve got literature up here. I’m not going to make the procession, but I know the procession starts in a few minutes. So if you’re going to your super session, you’re most welcome to go. If you want to stick around, I’m most happy to take questions because this is my life, and I’m so fired up that you took time to come and hear about it, and hopefully to burn with me with the same fire so God can advance this movement.