By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — “The first century Roman empire was just like now” with a culture of death, that women must lead the charge against, one of the speakers said during a morning presentation on St. John Paul II’s messages on beauty, arts, and the feminine genius.
Systems need to be redesigned to be more loving, Simone Rizkallah said St. John Paul said. Rizkallah, an official of a program to educate women about their dignity, later said that the saint said women are more capable than men of paying attention to another person because of their capacity to be mothers, whether or not they’re biological mothers.
Rizkallah is director of program growth for ENDOW, the acronym for Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women. She spoke by Zoom from southern California for the April 17 presentation conducted by the Institute of Catholic Theology, an evangelization program headquartered here at St. Thomas the Apostle Church. She has a graduate degree in Theological Studies from Virginia-based Christendom College.
The morning’s other speaker, Will Wright, is director of catechesis and parish life manager at Prince of Peace Parish at Sun City West, Ariz. He graduated from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, from a dual course in Catechetics & Evangelization and Theology & Christian Ministry.
Wright said that the good, the true, and the beautiful are the transcendental in life, but comprehending the good “is a difficult avenue to traverse today in our relativistic culture.”
St. John Paul said, “The very first artist is God Himself,” while he and Popes Benedict XVI and Francis are just the latest of the Pontiffs to agree that “art is more than mere entertainment” — it’s a manifestation of God, Wright said.
In his 1999 letter to artists, Wright said, St. John Paul said that God, the Creator, “creates out of nothing,” while the artist, the craftsman, “uses something that already exists” to further what God created.
Rizkallah said that in the current culture, motherhood often is punished, whether by the U.S. government, the United Nations, or other bodies, even though the future depends on mothers bringing forth the next generation.
She said she herself had absorbed current social thinking when, at age 12 or 13, she told her own mother that “you’re totally wasting your life raising us” when she could be doing something else, but her mother replied that she was doing the most important thing in the world.
The ENDOW group Rizkallah works with says it “seeks to educate women toward a more profound understanding of their God-given dignity through study in small group communities of faith and friendship. Rooted in the teachings of Pope St. John Paul II, ENDOW affirms the genius of women — the feminine genius — and empowers them to fulfill our culture’s desperate need for an authentic feminine presence in every aspect of life and society.”
St. John Paul “gave a lot of addresses on the feminine spirit,” exploring the dignity and rights of women as seen through God, and apologized when women had been mistreated through history, Rizkallah said.
“Jesus literally reminds women of their dignity. . . . Women were the first evangelizers, women were the first converts,” she said.
The Pope “says we need a new feminism” that rejects the pro-abortion brand of feminism that follows “models of male domination,” she said.
At the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, the Pope “ran a very successful campaign” to keep abortion out of the conference’s declaration, Rizkallah said.
Such international conferences were and are planned to promote Western secularism’s attacks on families and women, but the Pope helped lead affirmation of the traditional superior values.
Rizkallah said the Pope sent a letter that impressed Gertrude Mongella, the secretary general of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women.
His letter “wasn’t compromising or sugar-coating or anything of our Catholic teaching in faith,” Rizkallah said, but Mongella said “if all people thought like this, we wouldn’t even need a women’s conference.”
The Pope once lamented, “My own bishops don’t even read what I write,” Rizkallah said.
Asked by a member of the Zoom audience about how to deal with women still angry at the Church for not having women priests, Rizkallah said she will be releasing a podcast on this. She said, “Women don’t need to be ministerial priests” because of the other sacrifices they’re already called to offer in life.
If a woman sees herself according to what men can do, she’s measuring herself by men’s standards, Rizkallah said.
The Ocean Of Beauty
Wright, the morning’s other speaker, cited a comment by Los Angeles Archdiocesan Bishop Robert Barron that “beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the mind and heart of those he evangelizes.”
However, Wright said, St. John Paul said that alongside Christian humanism there had emerged a humanism without God that led in a different direction. Wright contrasted a beautiful image of the Blessed Mother and Baby Jesus with a meaningless-looking big blue blotch on a canvas.
The blotch might have made a viewer think of a psychological Rorschach test instead of inspiring artistic creativity.
Wright said Vatican II said, “Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart and is that precious fruit which resists the erosion of time, which unites generations and enables them to be one in admiration.”
St. John Paul wrote in his letter to artists: “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.”
The saint said that wonder, enthusiasm, and awe should occur when people think of God, and art should bring the same reaction, Wright said.
In the letter, the Pope said, “Artists of the world, may your many different paths all lead to that infinite Ocean of beauty where wonder becomes awe, exhilaration, unspeakable joy.”
One aspect of beauty is correct proportion, Wright said, explaining that if there were an icon of St. Nicholas where a person couldn’t find St. Nicholas, it’s probably not much of an icon of that saint. “It’s probably not very good art.”
Wright urged a groundswell of support for Catholic art.
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