This year’s diocesan Evangelization Leadership Summit held at Ohio Dominican University on Saturday, Nov. 16 was centered around God’s design for marriage and family.
The summit, organized by the diocesan Department of Evangelization and Catechesis, is designed for clergy, consecrated religious, parish and school leadership teams, staff and volunteers, parents and individuals interested in learning about diocesan evangelization efforts. It also offered strategies for evangelization and strengthening families and communities in the diocese.
“We all involved in ministry need an opportunity to be spiritually and catechetically formed. Even more, we need an avenue for a community amongst our peers to pray, listen and learn from each other,” said Dr. Marlon De La Torre, senior director for the Department of Evangelization and Catechesis. “The Evangelization Summit allows everyone to rest from everyday ministry’s challenges and be ministered to.
“The Evangelization Summit also provides the Department of Evangelization the opportunity to unveil the latest ministerial initiatives and directives from the diocese.”
Msgr. James Shea, a priest of the Diocese of Bismarck, North Dakota, served as a keynote speaker this year. He serves as president at the University of Mary in Bismarck and has spoken at numerous events, including the National Eucharistic Congress and Fellowship of Catholic University Students’ SEEK conference.
Other keynote speakers included De La Torre and Bishop Earl Fernandes, who also celebrated morning Mass at the summit.
Msgr. Shea’s keynote, “Marriage as a Sign of and a Participation in the Divine Drama,” explored how God uses marriage to draw individuals to Himself and make them more like Him.
He focused on the question, “Why does God care at all about us?” He said he wanted to take a “cosmic approach” rather than a political, sociological or historical one to answer it.
He reflected on Christ’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. Msgr. Shea said, while Jesus’ conversations are often brief exchanges, His conversation with the Samaritan woman is the longest recorded in all four gospels, reaching 42 verses.
The question at the center of the conversation is marriage. He explained that marriage is a central part of the human experience – an experience that takes center stage and is a participation in the divine drama.
Marriage, he said, is about the whole story of salvation.
“The essence of salvation can be distilled down to a right understanding of the mystery, the sacrament and the great adventure of marriage. This is important, especially in our own time, because … marriage has been flattened out,” he said.
“The depth and the meaning of it is lost on most people, not just because that’s inevitable in a humdrum and rough-and-tumble of life, in which the day of the wedding, so filled with the promise, excitement, deteriorates into the rough-and-tumble of daily life and dirty diapers and soccer practice. No, it’s not just practical in that sense. We live in a time in which marriage doesn’t mean anything.”
He asked, if marriage means nothing, why should individuals marry and have children? By such logic, he said, married life does not seem a natural or sensible way to live.
He also pointed out that a need for children is not as obvious today as historically, when children were needed for labor on the family farm or as soldiers in war. He said children now are often an unwanted burden or a desired luxury.
“Marriage is tending to be diminished from a serious social arrangement with evident desirable implications to a highly personal and emotional relationship between two people with little at stake apart from their preferences,” he said.
“If that’s the truth, it’s no wonder that people aren’t getting married anymore. On the sacramental records, we’ve seen a precipitous decline of couples approaching the Church for marriage. And on the civil side, marriages are being contracted less and less.”
However, Msgr. Shea said, God’s plan of salvation is directly connected to marriage and family.
He said God, not having to, chose to bring into existence creatures who otherwise would never have existed. Doing so made human beings sharers in God’s life, elevating them to His level. He explained that married couples do the same through welcoming children.
Msgr. Shea said God raised the human race to Himself so human beings – mortals – could be like gods. He described the teaching as so outrageous that there is no comparison to it.
“The essence of our faith is not simply that we should live a good life, that we should be contributors to society, that we should be moral in our action … educating children and caring for the poor,” he said.
“All of that is an overflow of this central reality that God’s purpose in bringing us into existence is that we should be deified, that we should become gods, divinized.”
God does that, Msgr. Shea said, first by making persons His children and then marrying the human race, joining them to Himself in marriage.
Marital imagery throughout Scripture is a sign of divinization.
Msgr. Shea gave an example of five women in Jesus’ genealogy: Ruth, Rahab, Tamar, Bathsheba and Mary. All were unlikely candidates, yet God raised them to “unimaginable heights,” he said, and each become part of the lineage of the Messiah.
He used a modern-day example of British royalty.
“Think of someone like Kate Middleton, the middle-class English girl who meets the prince, marries him and becomes a duchess and probably the future queen,” he said.
“This is what’s meant in Psalm 45, which is subtitled, ‘A Love Song.’ Speaking to the bride in the 45th Psalm, she’s told to forgive her people and her father’s house because the king will desire her beauty. … The Psalm goes on to say what a blessing this will be to her, how the richest of the people will come and give her wealthy gifts.
“Her sons will be princes. Her name will be celebrated all over the earth. Wealth, fame and power and influence are the blessings of her marriage. Comparatively, little is said about her emotional fulfillment.
“The point is that marriage has changed her status. She is now objectively in a new set of conditions. This is what we need to understand if we are to understand the love affair of God with the human race, which is very, very surprising.”
Msgr. Shea reflected how, in Scripture, God designed marriage from Genesis – first with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – through the end in the Book of Revelation.
“How could we understand this if we do not understand that God’s purpose in bringing us into martial relation with Him, in giving us His Body and His Blood as a bridegroom does his bride on their wedding night, that His purpose is to divinize us, to change our status entirely, to raise us from utter poverty, from prostitution, from disguises and darkness, from refugee status to the fullness of His life, to share in His glory,” Msgr. Shea said.
After the first parents were disobedient and ruptured humanity’s relationship with God, God even recreated marriage.
God brought His people, the Israelites, into a desert – the chosen place of courtship. God chose the desert, he explained, because it is a place where no human can survive alone. Through showing the Israelites their need for dependence on Him, God reversed the independence of Adam and Eve.
The Father ultimately sent His Son as the bridegroom of the human race, who died for His people.
“Death is the great curse, the deepest shame of the human race, and the most shameful way to die is in full view of everyone, naked, nailed to a cross, and in that epicenter of ultimate shame, in the vortex of shame, Jesus, in His love, hangs upon the cross for us, forsaking His glory, skirting the shame, reviling it, mocking it,” Msgr. Shea said.
“He is naked upon the cross without shame because His desire for us has swamped it, has overcome it, has healed it. And so, He rises up from the dead because our shame, the disgrace of our race cannot hold a love like that.”
Bishop Fernandes’ keynote, “The State of the Family in the Church,” focused on teachings of the last three popes – St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. The bishop referenced Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” encyclicals from Pope Benedict XVI and discussed the Holy Father’s vision for the family today.
He also focused on the deposit of faith and present-day challenges in handing it on. He explained the importance and duty to defend the deposit of faith.
The bishop explored how the breakdown of the family correlates to a rise in the “nones,” or those who do not practice any faith.
“The Evangelization Summit provided us with an opportunity to listen to our diocesan shepherd, Bishop Fernandes, speak on the importance of the family as the foundation for Catholic life,” De La Torre said.
“Msgr. James Shea’s message about the importance of the sacrament of marriage and his parallel between the woman at the well, Jesus’ discourse with her and our own relationship with Christ was an important highlight of the conference.
“The opportunity for religious educators from throughout the diocese to gather together in fellowship throughout the day beginning with Mass and concluding with Eucharistic Adoration was a blessing to experience.”
Breakout sessions were held in the afternoon. Several speakers offered talks concerning aspects of marriage and the family.
Sister M. Karolyn Nunes, the vocation director for the Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George, spoke on family as the seedbed of vocation and school of love. Sister Karolyn met the Sisters while studying at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she earned a degree in theology, and made her final vows in 2015.
A talk on family-shaped youth ministry was offered by Jim Beckman, the executive director of the ImpactCenter, a Catholic apostolate that ministers to Church ministry leaders, based in Colorado. Beckman has experience in diocesan and parish ministry, evangelization and leadership development. He has built several ministry programs in parishes and dioceses.
John and Sandy O’Shaughnessy, founders of Good Mourning Ministry, a mission-driven healing ministry supporting Catholic parishes throughout the United States, spoke on grieving the death of a loved one. The O’Shaughnessys discussed “The 7 Intentions of Mourning,” which they created as a guided pathway to healing and hope. It is available as a book and film series.
Dr. William Keimig, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, gave a talk on the Catechumenal Model in Whole Family Faith Formation. The model was designed to equip parents and walk with them in the formation of their children. In Whole Family Faith Formation, parish religious education classes incorporate parents in their child’s faith formation.
A live session of SoulCore, which is intended to nourish the body and soul through prayer, core strengthening and functional movements, was also offered. In a SoulCore session, which lasts about 45-60 minutes, participants contemplate the mysteries of the rosary and virtues at a deeper level. Classes are offered in the central Ohio area.
Father Paul Keller, OP (Order of Preachers), the director of the diocesan Office of Divine Worship, spoke about the sacramental power of marriage. Jason Spoolstra, the diocese’s associate director for marriage and family, offered a talk on the foundation of prayer in family formation.
Msgr. Shea also led a breakout session focused on proclaiming the kerygma, or Good News of Jesus Christ, in the Apostolic Age.
Father Adam Streitenberger, diocesan vicar for evangelization, led a Holy Hour with Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament to conclude the summit.
