Discerning Deacons turns 5 today!

Happy, happy fifth anniversary, Discerning Deacons, and a heartfelt, effervescent congratulations to everyone who has participated in these ascendant five years. May we continue to fly on the tailwinds of the Spirit, and may we continue to embody the renewal of the Church we seek with attentive listening, vast participation, and a lived witness of the synodal vision. 

I’m a cradle Catholic from New York’s Hudson Valley, raised amid the sacramental textures of East Coast Irish Catholicism: rosaries dangling from rear-view mirrors, a holy water font beside the front door, Mass on Sundays and holy days and family anniversaries alike. I was crankier than I was curious about the Church until a retreat in high school moved my experience of God from the altar into my own interior life. Make no mistake: there was no piety in this conversion. I was a pretty terribly-behaved teenager, and continued to be even though I was reading papal encyclicals in my free time; I used my high school demerit slips as my bookmarks. I know there is a God because, despite my fumbling and adolescent nonsense, I miraculously clawed my way out of my hometown and onto the campus of The University of Scranton, where I encountered Ignatian spirituality and had my soul turned inside out. Since then, I have made my vocational home, academic, professional, and otherwise, in Catholic life.  

I’ve enjoyed much more fumbling and nonsense since then. I’d like to think I’ve matured a bit, too. And so while I’m still a cantankerous Catholic, I am also now an endlessly curious one, and I’m in awe of the courage and compassion sourced from the lives of the prophetic witnesses who also call this faith theirs. I can’t exist uncritically in this Church I love so much. Blessedly, I also can’t exist in it alone. Any goodness I bring to my work is owed to the grace of community; I’m humbled by those illuminating the path between the Church we are, and the Church we could be.

Much of this witness is owed to women, and their creative, compelling, and competent faith. Advancing women’s giftedness is essential to forging this gap, to filling the chasm between our present and our future. 

Before beginning my work with Discerning Deacons, I served as Director of Campus Ministry at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (I can’t shake the Jesuits!). One of my great joys at LMU was bringing St. Phoebe Day to campus in 2023. For our 2025 celebration, I offered a reflection titled Brave Love in Ordinary Time, reflecting on a discipleship that reorders our lives, asking not only for kind love or generous love, but demanding brave, bold love. And in the spirit of “bringing the ambo to the streets,” I brought the ambo into the delivery room, sharing about the brave love demanded in the birth of my son. I didn’t mean to echo the quote attributed to Catherine of Siena: “Start being brave about everything,” but how fitting that her feast marks the anniversary of this movement’s founding, and how fitting that brave, bold love shows up throughout our discipleship, throughout our mission, throughout our Church.

May we invoke St. Catherine of Siena’s intercession this day, and may her witness as mystic, activist, and theologian galvanize us toward more prayerful, visionary change-making that calls forth the gifts of the faithful.

Five years into this mission, the question before the Church is still alive: how might the gifts women already pour out in service be more fully recognized and received?

I look forward to meeting many of you in the months ahead, hearing the stories that brought you here, and inviting your continued partnership in this holy work. If you believe discernment belongs to the whole people of God, I hope you’ll make an anniversary gift today. Each offering contributes to the sustainability of our mission; every gift creates our future. Click here to make your contribution.