Rely on God the Father’s love, youth leaders advised

The love of God the Father is an inexhaustible source of fulfillment for the human heart, Sr Bethany Madonna of the Sisters of Life said Thursday, Jan 8 at a Catholic youth leadership conference in Chicago.

Jan 27, 2018

By Joe Slama
The love of God the Father is an inexhaustible source of fulfillment for the human heart, Sr Bethany Madonna of the Sisters of Life said Thursday, Jan 8 at a Catholic youth leadership conference in Chicago.

“So many blessings are coming to us at every second of every day,” Sr Madonna said to an audience of approximately 8,000, “and the source of each and every one of these blessings is the blessing the Father gives us himself.”

Sr Madonna gave one of the keynote speeches on the third day of the Student Leadership Summit, an event hosted biennially by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students which aims to train young people to be effective evangelists.

The theme selected for this year’s conference, which ran January 2-6, was Inspire & Equip.

Sr Madonna is vocations director for the Sisters of Life, a New York based religious order founded in 1991 by the late Cardinal John O’Connor. Much of their ministry centres around aiding pregnant women and providing healing to those who have had abortions.

“Help us to receive the Father’s love anew, more deeply than we’ve ever received it before,” Sr Madonna prayed at the start of her talk.

She told the story of a couple named Matt and Lucy, friends of the Sisters, who found out shortly before their wedding that Matt had been diagnosed with cancer and had been given a year to live. The two cancelled their honeymoon in order to begin treatments.

Around the end of Matt’s treatments, doctors urged Lucy to abort their newly conceived child, fearing anomalies due to Matt’s chemo.

Instead, Matt and Lucy “began to pray,” trusting in God. In the end, she said, the only anomaly the child was born with was that two fingers were fused to the palm in such a way that his hands formed the sign for “I love you” in sign language.

“It was remedied with a simple surgery, but Matt and Lucy received it as a message from their Father, brought to them through a son, the Gospel in miniature,” Sr Madonna said.

However, even in the cases of great defects at a child’s birth, “the Father is saying, ‘I love you’ even more.”

She highlighted the uniqueness of the Father’s love, saying it makes for a relationship like no other. This love “goes to the extremes, indwelling.” She emphasised that only mortal sin can separate human beings from this love.

“When we sever ourselves like this, he holds onto our blessing, and awaits our return,” she said, referencing the parable of the Prodigal Son.

She told the story of Dr Michael Brescia, whom the Sisters of Life honoured this year with their annual Cardinal O’Connor award. Brescia developed a treatment for kidney disease in 1966, paving the way for the development of ongoing dialysis. Brescia was offered $1 billion to keep his discovery a secret for one year while a patent was developed.

She related a conversation Brescia had with his Italian immigrant father at the time. Brescia’s father, she said, was overcome with joy to know that 50,000 lives a year could be saved by his son’s discovery, but was dismayed to hear of the delay Brescia had accepted.

“‘Don’t think of this world,’” she said Brescia’s father urged. “‘You would let 50,000 people die?’”

Brescia published his discovery the next day. Sr Madonna said that, despite the invention now being worth $60 billion, he never gained anything from it financially. However, “he’s the richest man I know,” she said.

“Lasciare,” she said, using the Italian word for “release” or “let go” that Brescia’s father had spoken to him in urging his son to give up the discovery. “We too have to let go of so many things,” she said, “that keep us from the blessing that is ours.” --CNA

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