Magnificat Leaders Urged To Evangelize Women

By GRETCHEN KEISER, Staff Writer

Published: October 23, 2003

NEW ORLEANS—“The Magnificat meal is like a well where women can go and be refreshed in the Lord,” said Marilyn Quirk, one of the founders of the international ministry to Catholic women, which now has 61 chapters in the United States and abroad.

Magnificat leaders from the United States, Canada, Poland, the Caribbean and Malta gathered Sept. 24-27 for a leaders conference held every two years.

The ministry, founded in 1981 in the New Orleans Archdiocese, is inspired by the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth in Luke’s Gospel, by their practical love for one another and by the way they share their faith in God.

A “Magnificat meal” brings women together for fellowship, praise and prayer and to hear a speaker tell her story of God’s mercy and faithfulness in her life.

In Atlanta a Magnificat breakfast is held quarterly at Killian Hall in Lilburn. Beverly Stone of Mary Our Queen Church, Norcross, will speak at the next breakfast on Saturday, Nov. 8.

Atlanta chapter representatives who went to the New Orleans conference included the service team led by Susie Goodrow; Olga Myers, who founded the Atlanta chapter and now coordinates the Southeast region; and Father Joseph Mullakkara, MSFS, Atlanta spiritual advisor. Magnificat is an association of the Christian faithful with each chapter under the guidance of their local bishop.

Archdiocesan musicians Mary Welch Rogers and Elyse O’Kane also took part as cantors at conference liturgies. O’Kane was music minister for Atlanta’s Magnificat chapter for a decade.

The conference theme of evangelization asked leaders of Magnificat to consider the invitations of Jesus to “Come and See, Go and Tell.”

Quirk said Jesus showed that women have both maternal and prophetic roles as his followers.

During his Passion, he asked Mary to accept the disciple John as her own son and to help him and, by extension, all followers of Jesus. After his resurrection Jesus told Mary Magdalene and other women at the tomb not to fear but to go and tell his disciples and, by extension, the whole world, that he had risen from the dead.

Unfortunately “the world has evangelized women far more than the word of God,” Quirk said.

Women today can “see God” in many places, she continued, first “in our own baptized soul,” where God is present and where women need to discover the beauty in which he has made them. God can also be found through adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, in the sacrament of marriage, and in a life of prayer, she said.

She urged women active in Magnificat to dedicate themselves to “the inner life of prayer and intercession for the whole church,” especially in reparation for scandal and sin in the church.

“Please remember this specific aspect of reparation,” she said. “It is for our sake, that we might come to know something of the awfulness of what sin is.”

The second part of the message is “go and tell,” she continued. Women in their everyday lives need to tell people by example and by teaching that Christ is alive and that joy comes from acknowledging one’s sins and seeking and receiving God’s forgiveness.

The gap today between church teaching and public mores is so great that people have to be told about sin and taught about sin, Quirk said, before they can be set free by repentance.

“People are in frightful bondages to sin and to addiction and oftentimes to both,” she said. While people seek peace and happiness through many avenues, “no one else can give you joy except the Lord,” said Quirk, who coordinates the Magnificat central service team.

Like Mary, she said, many women may be called to “hidden lives” devoted to God. Lives of “active contemplatives,” who pray and fast while they go about daily life, can help renew the church from within, Quirk said.

“We are all people of the towel and the basin,” she said, called to wash feet. “You have a job to do. You have work to do. The church is supposed to be a great community of prayer and love and worship.”

Father Kevin J. Scallon, CM, spiritual director to Magnificat, told about how many years ago he was jolted from his propriety and his “good, old-fashioned pride” while a seminary professor at All Hallows Seminary in Dublin, Ireland, to be open to the Holy Spirit’s presence and action in the Catholic charismatic renewal.

“When I heard of Catholic Pentecostalism, I knew that it wasn’t anything a serious seminary professor like myself should have anything to do with. I avoided it like the plague. Still I was strangely drawn to it,” he said.

An encounter in Sydney, Australia, with the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship led him, despite humorous efforts to evade the opportunity, to realize that he was witnessing preaching of the Gospel and inspired worship music that he hadn’t seen before and couldn’t emulate. When asked to lead a prayer, he realized he had never said a spontaneous prayer.

“I realized what (the Lord) was saying to me: ‘Here you are, a Catholic priest, and you can’t even say a prayer. From that time on, my opposition to the charismatic renewal fell away,” he related.

Although Mary “was filled with the Holy Spirit” and had already followed God’s plan obediently through Bethlehem, Calvary and Easter, “she was hungry for more of God,” he said. “She was at Pentecost.”

“We have been lulled to sleep on the lap of the world,” he continued. “The Catholic Church is a sleeping giant and we need to wake up.”

He said that offering thanksgiving and praise to God is key to entering into God’s presence and to turning away discouragement, fear and self-satisfaction. Meditating on God’s word in Scripture is essential, he said.

Father John Randall, of Providence, R.I., called the 20th century “the century of the Holy Spirit,” noting that Pope Leo XIII invoked the Holy Spirit on the first day anticipating the eroding effect of evil, throughout the decades, on Christian life and on the world.

He expressed hope that the Marian movement in the church and the Holy Spirit movement in the church would work together, as Mary, in union with the Holy Spirit, gave birth to Jesus.

“The Holy Spirit’s strategy is for Mary and the Holy Spirit to be together,” he said.

He praised the balance in Magnificat between the role of Mary and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

At the same time, Father Randall and speaker Patti Mansfield of New Orleans, a leader in the Catholic charismatic renewal for 35 years, emphasized that a movement within the church is not an end in itself but simply a grace to bring people to know Jesus more and to be given a burning desire to respond to his love with lives of holiness.

“The pope says saints are people who have fallen in love with Jesus Christ,” said Mansfield. “The charismatic renewal has led people into an experience of this love . . . The church and the world need saints. Contemplate his face . . . Call the whole church to a high standard of Christian living.”

The essence of holiness, she said, is found in humility, obedience, love and yieldedness.

Speaker Babsie Bleasdell from Trinidad, who coordinates Magnificat chapters in the Caribbean islands, encouraged women to help one another to grow spiritually and to serve one another constantly.

“Scripture says the good woman laughs in the face of trouble,” Bleasdell said liltingly, after recalling her own experience of being assaulted violently in her home in recent years. “We have to encourage one another . . . Unless our zeal increases we are not going to make it in the time in which we are living. To encourage one another we have to live a certain kind of life. We have to pray. Use the name of Jesus, the precious blood, the word of God . . . Have an external sign of the grace within us. Learn the word of God. Ask him to put it on your heart, not just on your lips.”

Accept God’s forgiveness, she continued. “Don’t be a slave to what God has forgotten . . . remember how he picked you up.”

At the concluding Mass, Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes of New Orleans said, “God teaches us to recognize the rightful charismatic gifts in our midst. Magnificat is a lay organization which offers beautiful witness to God’s Spirit present in good, faithful and faith-filled women in the church.”

He also issued an intriguing challenge, calling on the women of Magnificat to reflect on Pope John Paul II’s call “to uncover the grounds for a genuine feminism.”

“The old feminism espouses power as a means, domination as an end,” he said. “The Holy Father says this gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and to service of them. It becomes the strong against the weak.”

“Is feminism redeemable?” Archbishop Hughes asked. “It is intriguing that our Holy Father thinks that not only is it redeemable but that it must be redeemed in Jesus Christ.”

Such a Christian vision of feminism would include special concern for children, would honestly confront the moral dilemma of having a career while serving as a mother, would see men as partners and not as adversaries and would respect human sexuality and the place of God in daily life, he said. “Mary is the model of a new femininity.”

The lay leaders of Magnificat’s chapters inspire him, he said. “Thank you for the witness you give to me of what it means to be a woman, a wife, a mother, a leader and a servant . . . Thank you not only for coming to see. Thank you also for going and telling.”