by Dawn Cherie Araujo
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Over the weekend, about 60 Catholic sisters under the age of 50 met in Kansas City, Kansas, for the annual Giving Voice national gathering.
The theme of the gathering was crossing boundaries in religious life, and the two keynote speakers — Sister of Charity of the Incarnate Word Sr. Teresa Maya and Holy Names Sr. Sophia Park — both focused on the increasing international and intercultural makeup of women religious, charging the sisters present with carrying the banner for change in their communities.
“What do we have to change?” Maya asked in her presentation. “Because we can’t be little pieces of a machine that was religious life.”
The Catholic church is becoming browner and browner, Maya said. And to prove her point, she asked how many sisters in the room had been born outside of the United States. About half raised their hands, and Maya encouraged the younger sisters to be unafraid to speak their truth to older sisters, whom she calls the “Great Generation.”
