Nell O’Leary, editor for the national Blessed Is She network, a long-running Catholic women’s ministry, said she sees one issue regularly surface for the women the organization serves: “Our identity as women, our identity as daughters of God, and all the lies the world tries to tell us, to pull us away from that identity.”
It is important to know that women are rooted in their relationship with God, she said, made in his image and likeness, and the world cannot take that away from them.
Nell O’Leary
Those thoughts helped form the direction of a new book published by Harper Collins called “Made New,” which includes 52 devotions for Catholic women. Each of the book’s five sections — beheld, belong, beloved, believing and becoming — is written by a different author and includes a reflection, a Scripture passage and a couple of questions.
O’Leary, a parishioner of St. Agnes in St. Paul and the book’s project manager and writer of its first section, said she wanted to develop a book that is “profoundly Catholic.” “We paid attention to the women we serve, but also just to our own hearts, of this idea of ‘beheld,’” that one’s value and importance does not come “from what you do or what you look like,” O’Leary said. Women may appear to the world as a success, but they are “beheld by God,” she said.
Cami Berthiaume, producer of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show, recently interviewed O’Leary and Liz Kelly to discuss the book. Kelly, an author, Catholic speaker and retreat leader, and a columnist for The Catholic Spirit, was one of the contributing writers to “Made New.”
Liz Kelly
Asked what struck her about the “becoming” theme she wrote about, regarding finding one’s identity in Christ, Kelly said it became clearer to her that the Gospel story was becoming her story, and that she is more clearly a part of salvation history. “It’s not just some dusty old story on some dusty old pages … to make myself feel better,” she said, “but, rather, I have a role to play and an assignment.”
Kelly said the book heightened her individual relationship with Christ and her sense of, “I’m a member of the body of Christ and I have … a joyful responsibility toward the other members.”
“Made New” can be found at local bookstores and at BlessedIsShe.net/Made-New.
The full interview with Kelly and O’Leary debuts 9 p.m. Feb. 18 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM. It also airs on Relevant Radio at 1 p.m. Feb. 19 and 2 p.m. Feb. 20.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Archbishop Bernard Hebda of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, who provides an update on the Archdiocesan Synod; and Deacon Nathan Allen, a judge for the archdiocese’s Metropolitan Tribunal, who discusses marriage annulments and free annulment consultations on Ash Wednesday.
Listen to all of the interviews after they have aired at
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