Nearly 20 years after people filled Royal Randwick racecourse for Mass with Pope Benedict XVI, nearly 1000 Catholic women met there again to be refreshed in their work of transforming the world. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
The inaugural conference hosted by the Catholic Women’s Network (CWN) of the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation, drew together 950 women to sing, pray, and reflect together on their human and spiritual identity as daughter, sister, mother, and bride.
Popular speaker and author Sr Miriam James Heidland SOLT travelled from her US home to be the keynote speaker for the event as part of a tour with Milwaukee-based author and retreat leader Fr John Burns.
Sr Miriam is an author and the co-host of the Abiding Together podcast, which offers spiritual reflections, especially for Catholic women. The sought-after speaker is known for her openness, authenticity, and theological depth in discussing healing, forgiveness, and ongoing conversion in the life of faith.
Under the conference theme of “Anointed”, Sr Miriam used her opening keynote to share a little of her own story of childhood and teenage trauma to reinforce a woman’s primary identity as a beloved daughter of God.
“With the sacrament of baptism, at that moment you and I came into a family. That indelible mark, no matter what we’ve done, or has been done to us, can never be erased,” Sr Miriam said.
“The beautiful thing about what God is doing in our life is that he continues to teach us and to heal us so that you and I can grow more deeply into our identity as a beloved daughter.
“This is not a clichéd kind of saccharine truth but a fearsome truth.”
She concluded the day with a reflection on women, and indeed all humanity, as the bride of Christ, and as religious life being a special glimpse of the Church’s eschatological reality. She added an emotional plea for her listeners to entrust themselves to Our Lady as their model and advocate.
Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP launched the network three years ago. He returned to open the conference by invoking the Holy Spirit to newly anoint all present with gifts for the building up of the Church in our time.
The archbishop has often commented that there is a “second spring” of Catholicism in Sydney and other parts of the world. As the archdiocese prepares for its 2026 Synod and hosting of the 2028 International Eucharistic Congress, he said, “we need your missionary zeal more than ever.”
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Women’s conference a ‘beautiful fruit’ of unique Sydney ministry (By Marilyn Rodrigues, The Catholic Weekly)
