EWTN News reports (June 26, 2026) on the 2026 GIVEN Catholic Young Women’s Leadership Forum held in Washington, D.C., presenting it as an initiative to help young Catholic women “understand their gifts and how to share them with the world.” The five-day gathering, hosted by the GIVEN Institute, features “keynotes, leadership training, mentorship, adoration, prayer, and Mass,” and aims to instill in participants the idea that “they are a gift” and “beloved daughter[s] of God.” Executive director Jennifer Cole-Schaefer stated: “We hope women will take away an understanding, on a much deeper level, that they are a gift. They are a beloved daughter of God… It’s all about receiving this idea that we are a gift, realizing what our gifts are, and responding in a way that only we can respond with our particular gifts.” The forum also bestowed Mother Agnes Mary Donovan, SV with its “Fiat Award,” honoring women who embody Our Lady’s response through “faithful leadership, service, and love.” Dominican Sister Mary Madeline Todd, OP delivered a keynote asserting: “God reveals ‘you are the gift’ and ‘you are the love’… Every gift we’ve been given is to call others into the relationship with the Lord they were made for.” This entire enterprise is a quintessential expression of post-conciliar modernist subversion, replacing the supernatural vocation of Catholic womanhood with a naturalistic, therapeutic cult of self-emptying “gifts” detached from the true holiness, sacrifice, and doctrinal fidelity demanded by the pre-1958 Church.
A Heresy of Omission: The Total Silence on Sanctity, Sacrifice, and the Supernatural Life
The most damning indictment of the GIVEN Institute’s forum is not what it says, but what it entirely omits. In hundreds of words about “gifts,” “leadership,” “mentorship,” and “action plans,” there is not a single mention of the foundational realities of the Catholic faith: the state of grace, the necessity of mortification, the reality of sin, the imperative of conversion, the salvific sacrifice of the Cross, the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as a propitiatory act, the virtues of faith, hope, and charity as theological virtues infused at Baptism, or the call to sanctity through the faithful observance of God’s Commandments. The forum’s language is a purely naturalistic, psychological, and horizontal discourse, indistinguishable from secular self-help programs, merely sprinkled with pious slogans. This is the religion of Modernism condemned by St. Pius X in *Pascendi Dominici gregis*: a system that reduces religion to subjective experience and social action, emptying it of all supernatural content. The integral Catholic faith teaches that the primary “gift” given to every soul is sanctifying grace, without which no one can see God (Council of Trent, Session VI, Chapter VII). The true “leadership” of Christian women is the leadership of the saints, who were crucified to the world and lived only for Christ. The GIVEN forum, by contrast, offers a gospel of self-actualization, a religion of “comfort” and “convenience” which it itself claims to reject, while promoting precisely that under the guise of “communion.”
The Modernist Cult of the “Gift” and the Eradication of the Cross
The relentless repetition of the phrase “you are a gift” is not a Catholic sentiment but a modernist mantra. It shifts the focus from God to the self, from the Giver to the created thing. Catholic doctrine, as defined by the Council of Trent, teaches that the true and perfect gift is the Holy Ghost, the first gift of the sanctifier, through whom charity is poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5). The GIVEN Institute’s anthropocentric language is a direct assault on the absolute primacy of God and His grace. It reduces the supernatural life to a natural talent show. The words of Sister Mary Madeline Todd are emblematic: “Your story is a way he’s bringing beauty into the world. But know that no matter what comes and goes with your gifts, the gift is him. His friendship, his presence, his love, is the gift he’ll never take away.” This is a subjectivist, emotionalist heresy. The true Catholic position is that God’s love is not a “gift” in the sense of a pleasant feeling of “presence,” but the objective state of sanctifying grace, which can be lost by mortal sin and must be recovered through the Sacrament of Penance. The forum’s entire program is a program of *immanentism*, condemned in *Lamentabili sane exitu* (Proposition 20: “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God”). It is the religion of the natural man, baptized with Catholic vocabulary.
False Apostles and the Paramasonic Structure of the “Conciliar Sect”
The GIVEN Institute operates within and for the structures of the post-conciliar “Church,” a paramasonic structure that has systematically apostatized. Its forum features speakers like Dr. Mary Healy, a Scripture professor associated with the “Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture,” a project of the modernist publishing house Baker Academic, and a figure fully aligned with the historical-critical method condemned by St. Pius X. The “Masses” celebrated at this forum are, in all likelihood, the Protestantized Novus Ordo Missale, a rite that the pre-conciliar Church would not recognize as a valid expression of the Roman Canon, being a human creation designed to minimize the propitiatory sacrifice and the Real Presence. To participate in such a “Mass” is to participate in a counterfeit liturgy. The “mentorship” and “action plans” are the formation of cadres for the “Church of the New Advent,” women formed not in the Fear of the Lord and the discipline of the cloister or the Christian home, but in the spirit of the world, prepared to be “leaders” in a bureaucratic, secularized, and apostate institution. The “Fiat Award” given to Mother Agnes Mary Donovan, SV, a Sister of Life, is a classic modernist co-option, using the language of Our Lady’s *Fiat* to sanctify a “leadership” that is entirely horizontal. True *Fiat* is the submission of the intellect and will to God and His revealed truth, not a program of “faithful leadership” within a heretical structure.
The Syllabus of Errors and the Rebellion Against Christ the King
The entire GIVEN Forum is a practical manifestation of the errors condemned by Pope Pius IX in *The Syllabus of Errors*. It embodies the indifferentism of Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true,” by reducing the Catholic faith to a set of personal “gifts” and “callings” rather than the one true religion to which all must convert. It promotes the laicism of Proposition 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church,” by operating as a secular “nonprofit” with a Catholic veneer, its language of “leadership” and “community service” indistinguishable from the world’s. Most gravely, it is a rebellion against the Social Kingship of Christ proclaimed by Pius XI in *Quas Primas*: “The State must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations… who… strive for perfection and endeavor that the holiness… may shine eternally and with ever greater splendor before the eyes of all men.” The GIVEN Institute does not strive for holiness as the pre-conciliar Church understood it—the pursuit of sanctity through the observance of the Commandments and the evangelical counsels—but for a worldly “change” through “action plans.” It is the religion of the “progressive” conciliar sect, which has reconciled itself with the world, with liberalism, and with modern civilization, in direct defiance of the condemnation of that proposition (Proposition 80 of the Syllabus: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to to reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization”).
The Diversion from the Real Enemy: Modernist Apostasy Within
The GIVEN Forum, like the entire post-conciliar apparatus, is a diversion from the true crisis of the Church: the modernist apostasy that has raged since the beginning of the 20th century and was unleashed in full force after 1958. As the analysis of the “Fatima” operation demonstrates, the focus on external threats (communism, secularism) is a smokescreen for the internal enemy. The GIVEN Institute is a product of this internal enemy. It does not form women to combat heresy, to defend the true Mass, to promote the integral Catholic faith, or to work for the conversion of souls to the one true Church. It forms them to be “leaders” within the very structure that is the source of the crisis. It is a program of formation for the “abomination of desolation,” teaching young women that their “gifts” are to be used for the “Church and the world,” a world that lies in the power of the evil one (1 John 5:19). The true Catholic response is not to seek “leadership” in a apostate structure, but to flee it, to cling to the integral faith, the true sacraments, and the path of salvation as taught by the Church for two millennia. The GIVEN Institute is not a solution; it is a symptom of the disease, a recruitment center for the “synagogue of Satan” that now occupies the Vatican.
Conclusion: The Call to Reject the Neo-Church and Return to Immutable Tradition
The GIVEN Catholic Young Women’s Leadership Forum is a microcosm of the post-conciliar apostasy. It offers a naturalistic, therapeutic, and horizontal “formation” that is entirely devoid of the supernatural content of the Catholic faith. It promotes a cult of the self, disguised as a cult of “gifts,” while ignoring the necessity of sanctifying grace, the reality of sin, the imperative of conversion, and the salvific sacrifice of Christ. It operates within and for the paramasonic structures of the conciliar sect, forming cadres for an apostate institution. It is a practical heresy, a diversion from the true crisis of the Church, and a recruitment center for the religion of the Antichrist. The true Catholic woman is not a “leader” in the world’s sense, but a daughter of the Church, a spouse of Christ, a mother in the supernatural order, whose life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). The only “gift” that matters is the grace of God, which leads to eternal life. The only “action plan” is the pursuit of sanctity through the faithful observance of God’s Commandments and the teachings of the one, true, pre-conciliar Catholic Church. The GIVEN Institute and the entire “conciliar sect” must be rejected, and young women must be called not to “change the world,” but to save their souls and the souls of others through the integral Catholic faith, outside of which there is no salvation.
Source:
Catholic women's leadership forum tells young women: 'You are a gift' (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 26.06.2026