Gulf Pine Catholic

Gulf Pine Catholic • August 16, 2024 21 NEC24 Day 4 Daytime From page 20 Rather, she said, Jesus wants His disciples to be transformed and “be crea- tures of love and for love. To be in His image.” At the Cultivate impact session for families, Damon and Melanie Owens spoke about the importance of developing families’ commu- nal relationships with each other. The couple of 31 years and parents of eight are the co-founders of the Joy Ever After marriage and family ministry. “It’s essential to build a tribe, those families you can trust to share in forming your children, your family with,” said Damon. “Kids provide opportunities to meet fami- lies with other kids. But it’s about finding those who real- ly share your faith, your val- ues and mission, and making the decision to share with them.” Melanie Owens encour- aged moms to find a “collective of women to open up your heart with, where you can trust and support each other.” She said, “I wanted Damon to fulfill me and make me happy, especially after I’d been with the kids all day. But I needed to form a collective with women to do that. That helps create better families.” Lisa Brenninkmeyer, founder and CEO of Walking with Purpose , a Catholic ministry providing Bible studies and community for women, at the Empower session said that Catholics need to respond to the hidden epidemic that plagues the faithful and society as a whole: loneliness and isolation. She called attention to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s recent findings that “even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness.” Drawing from the example of the early church in Acts, Brenninkmeyer said that “when the church comes together and offers an experience of true community, transformation happens.” She acknowledged that St. Paul’s exhortation for Christians to “bear one another’s burdens” is not easy. “Isolation is frankly easier oftentimes,” she said. “We come up against the pain of being in rela- tionship with broken people and we get hurt,” she said, “so we pull back and we isolate,” but “the very circumstances that so often are indicating to us that we need to pull back from this community are the very things that God is bringing into our lives through the community so that we can be trans- formed into the image of Christ.” She encouraged those gathered “to keep showing up,” building relationships within their community and growing them in their families in order to “build a church where no one stands alone.” In the Renewal impact session for ministry lead- ers, Curtis Martin, founder of FOCUS , the mission- ary outreach to college students, told them they can only be effective evangelists if they trust the trans- formative power of the Gospel truly works. He exhorted them to have a sense of urgency and not become complacent. Martin said that while God will take care of things, “He really wants you to pray and to weep and to fast and to love the poor, because He did those things for us.” “The crisis in our culture today is not because Jesus is less relevant. He has never been more rele- vant,” Martin said. “We have the best story in the world. Not only is it fascinating and compelling -- it’s true.” At an emotional final Abide impact session for clergy, Dan Cellucci, CEOof the Catholic Leadership Institute , shared the story of his son Peter’s diagnosis with a malignant brain tumor at age seven (7) and how the illness was not “what he signed up for” as a husband and a father. He related the struggles of his fatherhood to the struggles that so many priests face in their own priestly ministries, where it is all too easy to become disil- lusioned and think that this is not “the cruise ship that I signed up for.” “So many of you have been broken by trauma, by feeling betrayed ... or just beat down,” he said. He said to those “hanging on by a thread, ready to explode or implode because the life they said ‘yes’ to is now more than the life they imagined and wanted ... you have made the right choice to be here, to be a part of this experience with your broth- ers, and I pray for you to hang on. Jesus wants to heal you.” Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, followed Cellucci’s testimony by contemplating with his brother priests the “poverty of Christ,” chal- lenging them to become ever more configured to Christ and pouring themselves out for the good of their people. “This is the point,” he said. “That the Christ makes Himself fully present and fully known in His true sense of who God is -- as the God who gives Himself out.” As the morning’s sessions concluded, the Indiana Convention thrummed with joy and anticipation of the coming Eucharistic procession through down- town Indianapolis that afternoon. A massive line snaked through the convention center to see exhibits on Eucharistic miracles and the Shroud of Turin, while young people marched through singing joyful- ly their love for Jesus. In another jubilant spontaneous moment, a group of women from all over the U.S. with the Catholic Women’s Association -- Cameroon sang and danced to songs speaking their love for Jesus and Mary, expressed through their Cameroonian heritage. “We’re thirsty for you Jesus, we’re thirsty for you, Jesus, we are thirsty for you -- and that is why we are here.” Contributing to this story were Julie Asher, Lauretta Brown, Gretchen R. Crowe, Maria-Pia Negro Chin, Gina Christian, Natalie Hoefer, John Shaughnessy, Peter Jesserer Smith and Maria Wiering. A religious sister prays during Holy Qurbana July 20 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis during the National Eucharistic Congress. Holy Qurbana is the name for Mass in the Catholic Church’s Syro-Malabar rite. OSV News photo/Bob Roller Pray for an increase of vocations to the priesthood, to the diaconate, and to the religious life, especially in the Diocese of Biloxi