Conference speaker urges women to truly trust in God

Carrie Gress sought marriage in her life, and knew she had to get out of Washington D.C., where women outnumber men and the culture and power make for complicated dynamics.
But where to go?

“It turned out God was calling me to live in Rome,” said Gress, a featured speaker at the upcoming Oklahoma Catholic Women’s Conference, set for March 29 at the Oklahoma City Convention Center.

“I just laughed, because I thought, ‘Every man that I know there is an ordained priest or seminarian. You know, how is this going to work out? And I ended up meeting my husband. He had already tried out religious life and discerned it wasn’t for him.

“God knows what he’s doing.”

That concept – trusting in God to lead – factors into her conference talk, one of four planned for the day.

The speaker lineup also includes Montse Alvarado, president and COO of EWTN; Sister Mary Grace, S.V., who serves under the Sisters of Life in Denver; Rachael Killackey, founder and director of Magdala Ministries, where the mission focuses on helping women recover from sexual addiction and compulsion; and Gress, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a scholar at The Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University of America.

Registration is available at okcatholicwomen.com with general admission tickets at $79, students $59.

The move to the Convention Center allows the conference to expand its reach, after years of sellouts.

“One of the hardest parts of past conferences was having to turn away so many (women) simply because of a lack of space,” said Laura Murray, hospitality chair. “Move to the Oklahoma City Convention Center means we are able to welcome more women than ever before to encounter Christ through our amazing speakers, adoration, confession and the celebration of Holy Mass.”

Gress urges women to trust in God, not the culture or feminist ideals.

“I’ve done an incredible amount of research on feminism,” she said, “and the one thing I’ve seen that it has done is make this idea of independence a real idol for women in our culture today. There’s this sense that we all have, and it’s seeped deeply into Catholics as well, that somehow our lives are going to be better if we’re just in control of them, and we are the ones in charge and we are the ones deciding when we do this and we do that.

“The reality is there could actually be nothing further from what God is calling us to, which is surrender and humility. And obviously that is modeled in Our Lady, but also the lives of the saints.

“When we try to control things, I think most of us have had the experience of knowing it doesn’t really go well.”

Gress has written books and blog posts about the pitfalls of feminism. Her work has also appeared in many publications and she has been a featured guest on a variety of podcasts and news programs, often talking about women and their role in the world, as planned by God.

“What is it God wants us to do?” she said. Specifically, what is he asking of us and how is he using us? We’re not just kind of cogs in a machine. He has planted us in this very specific time period for a reason. What is that?

“I think those are the kind of questions that come up at a conference like this, where we begin to feel a sense of the meaning of our life and how that needs to be played out in our daily lives.”

John Helsley is editor of the Sooner Catholic.