Veil + Armour: Raising Kids Catholic Through the Feminine Genius and Courageous Christianity

13. Sister Helena Burns: From Radical Feminist to Catholic Feminine Genius

Share episode

Send us a text

The Catholic Feminine Genius vs. Radical Feminism: An In-Depth Discussion with Sister Helena Raphael Burns, fsp

Join us on the Veil and Armour podcast for an enlightening conversation with Sister Helena Raphael Burns, a member of the Daughters of St. Paul, who is well-known for her media ministry. 

We are talking about the "F' word this week: Feminism!

In this episode, Sister Helena Burns fsp focuses on God's divine design for humanity, and discusses her journey from Radical Feminism to embracing the Feminine Genius. She deep dives into what Radical Feminism entails, its implications on society, and contrasts it with the Catholic Church's perspective of the Feminine Genius, coined by the late Great Saint John Paul II. Learn about her insights on Theology of the Body, the differences between men and women, and how these differences reflect God's creation. Sister Helena also shares personal stories, scientific facts, and theological insights that helped her debunk radical feminist views and to find peace in her feminine identity in Jesus Christ.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:22 Opening Prayer

01:49 Sister Helena's Background and Work

03:25 Defining Radical Feminism

03:41 Damage from Radical Feminism

4:04 What is feminism?

4:49 Radical Feminism

5:11 Our souls and bodies are gendered

6:02 Spiritual mothers and fathers

6:09 The fallacy of Radical Feminism

6:28 The brain: male vs. female

6:45 Transgendersim

07:02 Impact of Radical Feminism

8:18 Radical Feminism and Resentment

10:17 Women's power, authority and gifts

10:24 Getting out of Radical Feminism

10:52 Gender roles

11:48 Theology of the Body

12:18 Design of the Body

12:59 Personal Journey into Radical Feminism

13:04 Background in Radical Feminism

13:54 Are women oppressed?

15:04 Do radical feminists hate men?

15:26 Focus on self

15:45 "Women can have it all"

15:57 Social Media and its impact on women

16:48 The allure of Radical Feminism in Sr. Helena Burns' younger years

16:55 Cultural Influences and Media

17:19 Terrible message to women

16:55 Sr Helena Burns' causes

25:31 The Feminine Genius

27:22 Masculinity and Femininity

32:22 Understanding Gender and Biology

33:19 Philosophical Insights on Identity

35:29 Is there an ideal "masculine" and "feminine"?

36:56 The Feminine Genius According to John Paul II

37:42 Scientific Backing for Gender Differences

39:36 Men and Women: Different Yet Complementary

46:21 Transcendence and Immanence: Imaging God

48:03 The Beauty of Biological Differences

54:17 Celebrating the Unique Design of Men and Women

58:13 Conclusion 

To connect with Sr. Helena, please visit: http://www.hellburns.com
@SrHelenaBurns on X/Twitter and @SrHelenaBurnsfsp on YouTube

Connect with Sheila:
- Instagram
- X / Twitter
- Website

https://veilandarmour.com
Please subscribe to our show! hello@veilandarmour.com

If you like our podcast apostolate, please like, share, subscribe, comment and give us a review. We would love to hear from you! You can also send us a text message on FanMail via Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Buzzsprout.


Support the show

Sheila Nonato:

Hello and Welcome to the Veil and Armour podcast. This is your host, Sheila Nonato. I'm a stay-at-home mom and a freelance Catholic journalist, Seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the inspiration of Our Lady. I strive to tell stories that inspire, illuminate and enrich the lives of Catholic women, to help them in living out our vocation of raising the next generation of leaders and saints.

Co-host:

Please join us every week on the Veil and Armour podcast, where stories come alive through a journalist's lens and mother's heart.

Sheila Nonato:

Welcome to this week's episode. We are honoured to have Sister Helena Burns, who will share with us her story of being a former Radical Feminist and how she embraced the Feminine Genius, her feminine identity, in Christ. The interview took place on July 3rd (corrected date). We are now in August, during the month of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Let's hear Sister Helena guide us on her journey from Radical Feminism to the Catholic Feminine Genius. This is a little different this week in that the interview is an hour long. If you need to hit pause and come back for the next 30 minutes, please do. I know how busy it gets with motherhood. It is well worth it and was a remarkable conversation with an amazing New Media Evangelist. Sister Helena, Welcome to the Veil and Armour podcast. This week we have as our guest Sister Helena Raphael Burns. Welcome, Sister Helena. Thank you, glad to be here. Thank you, and I'm sure many of our listeners know who you are through your media ministry. I'll expand a little bit on that, but I was wondering if you could please lead us in a prayer.

Sister Helena Burns:

Sure In the name of the Father and of you, could please lead us in a prayer.?

Sister Helena Burns:

Sure In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Sister Helena Burns:

Heavenly Father, we thank you for gathering us for this wonderful time together, especially focusing on women and feminine identity, the Feminine Genius in Christ.

Sister Helena Burns:

We thank you for making us women, Lord. We thank you, our most wonderful Creator, who gave us this design, the desires that we have and the destiny that we have as women. Please help us to embrace this and not to rebel against it. We thank you for being human, which means body and soul, and we thank you for how you created us, differently from men. We thank you for your beautiful divine order in creation, in the world, in the family, in the church, in society. We ask you to give us this biblical worldview. Open up your word to us so we will see our incredible but unique dignity as women. We want to follow your ways, Lord, which are hard, but they're also the ways of truth, beauty and goodness and fulfilling our purposes. We ask all of this through our Blessed Virgin Mother, through your Son Jesus Christ and His most precious blood, in this month of July dedicated to the most precious blood. Amen, In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Sheila Nonato:

Thank you very much and I just wanted to, if you would allow me, I just wanted to add a little bit more about your work. So you are a member of the Daughters of St Paul, an international congregation of Roman Catholic sisters founded to communicate God's word through the media. Sister Helena Burns has a Master of Arts in Media Literacy Education and a Bachelor of Arts in Theology and Philosophy from St John's University in New York City. She studied screenwriting at UCLA and Act I Hollywood writing at UCLA and Act One Hollywood. Sister Helena holds a certificate in pastoral youth ministry and she wrote and directed a documentary on the life of the church's new media saint Blessed Father James Alberione, called MediaApostlecom and is a co-producer on The40Filmcom.

Sheila Nonato:

Sister Helena has written a Theology of the Body curriculum used in her online Theology of the Body certificate course through Sacred Heart College in Peterborough, ontario, canada. And Sister Helena gives media literacy and Theology of the Body workshops and courses to youth and adults all over Canada and the United States. She believes that media can be a primary tool for sharing God's love and salvation. She is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States and an international woman of mystery. Happy Canada Day and happy 4th of July, sister Helena. Oh same to you?

Sheila Nonato:

Yes, and I am very fascinated about this topic of the Feminine Genius and Feminism in general, which is the topic of our podcast, and can you please tell me what is radical feminism?

Sister Helena Burns:

Sure, and you know we've been having these long chats off air, Sheila, you know, and both of us have a background in radical feminism, meaning that we embraced it right. We thought it was the way to go, we thought that was the right thinking about women to embrace, and I don't know about you, but I feel like very damaged from it and it took me a very long time to get out of it. So just to define our terms, because a lot of times people just talk about feminism and they never exactly say what they mean by it, and there's many different kinds of feminism today. So what I like to say, Feminism in its most simple form, is the protection and promotion of women, and to me that's a good thing that we'll always need some form of protection and promotion of women. Now, what you believe a woman is that's where that's going to go in all different directions what you think her good protection and her good promotion is and by promotion I don't mean some sort of false myth of progress or progressivism and change, change, change. Promotion could be something as simple as finding a way for moms who don't have a lot of money to be able to stay at home and raise their own kids, you know, without working, maybe three jobs or something, and having others raise her kids for her.

Sister Helena Burns:

So Radical Feminism is the denial that there are significant differences between men and women. There's just a few different reproductive body parts. That's really only. What makes us different is the way that we reproduce, and that has no impact on our mind, our soul, how we do things, how we experience life, etc. Etc. Which is patently false, because we are body and soul and our souls are also gendered, because the body is an expression of the soul. The body reveals the soul. Human beings are not angels, we're not pure spirits and we're not animals who have material souls, or rather mortal souls that die when the organism dies. Plants have plant souls, animals have animal souls. We have immortal souls, and that is all part of our personhood. You know, animals are not persons. Angels are persons, but they're persons with no bodies, you know. So we have to understand that our body has so much to tell us about who we are, and not just in the reproduction sense, but in so many other ways, even though that's key. The sexuality is key, but not everyone's going to get married, not everyone's going to have children, et cetera, but it still matters. We're still spiritual mothers or spiritual fathers or brides and bridegrooms in relation to God.

Sister Helena Burns:

Even so, Radical Feminism is biologically incorrect and scientifically incorrect, because now we have so much more science that we didn't even have in the 70s, when this all kind of the 60s and 70s, when this came to the fore, which was called second wave feminism, which was what I was most impacted by and we know that there's the feminine brain, the masculine brain. We know that baby boys, they have a testosterone wash in the womb and even when they're little toddlers testosterone wash in the womb, and even when there's little toddlers, the testosterone is forming them in a different way than girls. So then this, of course, led right into eventually, transgenderism. Well, if there's no, you know, if we're all the same, then we're interchangeable, which, of course, is not true either, because if we're going to celebrate diversity, there's got to be some diversity, right? Okay, now I am no longer a radical feminist and for a while I called myself a theology of the body feminist, but I don't even say that anymore because the word feminism comes with so much baggage and again, even if we stop and define our terms, it's almost like it's going to take a whole conversation to really explain what feminism is and how both men and women have felt hurt by Feminism. Some women know they still obviously buy into it and I feel like it's so embedded in the culture now that even our young women, they may not have even heard some of the slogans of the second wave or third wave feminists, but it's just being lived out in the culture and so they sort of jump onto it.

Sister Helena Burns:

You know, and it's this, "ou go, girl, I'm all about. You know, self-esteem, a proper self-esteem. But you know, if you're a Christian, we believe in humility. You know, and it's like you go, girl, I can do whatever a man can do. I'm better than men. Men are so stupid and women are so amazing. And I'm a 10, all these women, they think they're 10s and they deserve a high value man and like what the heck? And yet they're like selling their bodies on OnlyFans and like it's all messed up, right, and a lot of this stuff. It yeah, it did come right out of feminism.

Sister Helena Burns:

The one thing about Radical Feminism is women. These women, as I did, they really don't like being women. They resent having been born a woman and again, I'm not talking about anything trans or they feel like they want to transition or anything. They just resent that they have to give birth, that women are the ones who have to nurture small children. They don't want that and maybe they do actually want it, but they've pressed that down because society has told them you're not going to go to your full potential if you have children, or if you have too many children, or if you stay home with your kids. And so there's just so many lies. Women have been sold a pack of lies through Radical Feminism.

Sister Helena Burns:

And you know the women's movement was not the same thing as women's lib. There's a wonderful book called Subverted how I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement. The women's movement was about equal pay, equal opportunities, some things like that. It was not about these women did not want to go fight in war, they did not want to be drafted, they did not want to be in combat, they just wanted. They wanted sexual harassment laws in place, you know, in the workplace and things like that. They just wanted to be treated fairly and justly.

Sister Helena Burns:

But this women's lib crazy stuff. I can have sex like a man, which means promiscuity. Did God intend for men to have sex that way? No, and it's crazy. It's like no, you can't, because you're probably going to get pregnant at some point, even if you're on your birth control or whatever, and, of course, abortion is a horror of taking the life of your child. So they're really lies. I can have sex like a man no, that's a lie. I can be as good as a man no, you can't. You're not a man. And why would you want to be? That is a false admission of inferiority to say I can be as good as a man. Why are you looking towards men and what men are doing? Do your own thing. Women have their own power, authority, gifts, influence and mission.

Sister Helena Burns:

Now, I think getting out of Radical Feminism can help if you're a believer. I think it can still be done, if you believe in nature, if you truly believe in science and biology, and if you get some good sociology that can show you what's really for human flourishing and what's really good for women and not good for women, but if you know that this is all coming from a loving creator, the way he made you. And, yes, gender roles we have gender roles. Men have roles. Women have roles. We have our place in society, too, right. So like, oh, what's women's place? Is it barefoot and pregnant and staying at home? No, not necessarily there. But everyone has their place in creation, in the divine order. Rocks have their place, trees have their place, giraffes have their place, women have their place, men have their place, children have their place. Giraffes have their place. Women have their place, men have their place, children have their place. Old people have their place. Right, we all take on and these are not fake roles, they're rather what we're good at. They're rather what we're designed for and what we do best, just naturally, as women, because of the gifts that we have, gifts of body and soul.

Sister Helena Burns:

I just want to say that how can we know if there are certain cultural norms or cultural expectations for men and for women? How do we know if they're healthy? Well, theology of the body which, by the way, if I didn't say this, this is what got me out of radical feminism was theology of the body. Bit by bit, piece by piece. It took me decades. It was like a building blocks. I'd get one little piece of the puzzle the theology of the body. Bit by bit, piece by piece. It took me decades. It was like a building blocks. I'd get one little piece of the puzzle the theology of the body puzzle, another piece of the Theology of the Body puzzle. So if a gender role is based on the design of the body and the soul because they go together, souls are gendered of a man, then that's a healthy gender role for him. If it's based on the way the design of the body is which reflects the soul, then that's a healthy gender role for a woman.

Sister Helena Burns:

We serve many roles, right, I don't mean just professions. But if you're an artist, that's a role that you don't just do nine to five. You are an artist, you have the soul of an artist, right, that's beautiful and you don't mind having that role because you love art and you're good at artist. Right, that's beautiful and you don't mind having that role because you love art and you're good at it, right, well, we should love being a woman and what all that encompasses, right. And again, we'll talk a little later about like, we're not talking stereotypes, we do not talk class ceilings, stereotypes. Those are very harmful, not helpful.

Sheila Nonato:

So, sister Helena, I've been watching some of your talks online and in one of them you had mentioned, I think, a few times you had mentioned that you had come to Radical Feminism in eighth grade. Can you tell me this background in radical feminism? How did you get into it and how did you get out of it?

Sister Helena Burns:

Well, it was actually earlier than eighth grade, I'll tell you, you get out of it. Well, it was actually earlier than eighth grade, I'll tell you. Well, I think what I said is that I was pretty much formed, like all my opinions and my principles and my plans for the future, by eighth grade. I was set, you know, but it started much younger than that. I went to public schools and things weren't as crazy as they are today, but I read a lot. We were taught how to read before we went to kindergarten and we were little geeks, my brother and I, and we loved to read and I would just devour anything and I wanted to understand the beautiful, modern world, I was living in, you know, and it made sense, though.

Sister Helena Burns:

There was an internal cohesion to what the Radical Feminists were saying and I believed. All women were oppressed. Yes, we've been oppressed all these years and every man is basically out to oppress women. They don't really value and honor women. They want to find a way to keep us down so that we can't go ahead and they don't really value us. They laugh at us in the locker rooms and make fun of us and they only want us for our bodies. And now, some of that is true, but this is not every man all day long. You know what I'm saying. It almost negated the fact that there are good men.

Sister Helena Burns:

And one thing I couldn't understand I was also watching my friend's mothers. My mother never went that route, but I was watching my friend's mothers telling their husbands off and refusing to make supper, even though they were stay-at-home moms, and they were like putting their like. It was just, it was. It was crazy and some of it was kind of ugly too. And I remember thinking, well, I don't want that, cause I was more of like a hippie. I was very bohemian and like love and peace. I couldn't hate men because that would negate my love and peace principles, you know. But I was almost there. I was almost a man hater.

Sister Helena Burns:

And one thing I remember thinking like all these women are married who are telling their husbands off and saying that men are terrible, and they really had those consciousness raising groups where women were told you're oppressed. They were told you should all have careers, you should not be staying at home, even if you want to, with your kids. They don't need you. You need to be. You know, focus on you, you, you, me, me, me. And these women started to feel inferior because of that right. They were at peace. In a sense. It's almost like the devil got in and made these women so unhappy and told them no, you have to have a degree to be happy. No, you have to have two degrees to be happy. No, you have to have a career, not just a career, but a high paying career where you're social, climbing and gaining notoriety.

Sister Helena Burns:

And there's never enough of that right. And now there's social media. So that can just really wreak havoc on a woman, even a young girl or a single woman, because we like to communicate, right, ladies, like to communicate and say what you will, but women are still all about their appearance most women and they're going on Instagram all the time and looking for perfection and Photoshopping. And this is a false world. It's just so fake, right? And what happens is we empty out our souls when we do this, when we're focused on externals and competition and keeping up with everyone and with the world the new hairstyles and the new it's okay to look, okay, it's okay to follow that a little bit, but is that going to be the core content of your life? And I understand you can make follow that a little bit, but is that going to be the core content?

Sister Helena Burns:

of your life and I understand you can make money through these things too. But you've got to be grounded, You've got to be based in all of these things. So that's how I got into radical feminism reading news, magazines, reading newspapers I started reading a newspaper at 12 years old, like from a daily newspaper and just watching the women around me watching the TV shows that were always putting men down. They started the 70s to put men down. Men were the buffoon and it's still nothing has changed. The father of the family is an idiot. He's a buffoon. He's so stupid he can't do anything. The wife can do anything and everything and she just tolerates his presence because they like him. And this is a terrible message also being sent to our boys and our young men that men are basically idiots. And I think a lot of young men reject this. But what can they do? Go protest Hollywood. It's nasty, it's not right. Nobody should be treated that way. It's almost like a reverse psychology. If any of this was happening to women now. It's like open season on men to turn around and put men down that way.

Sister Helena Burns:

So my Radical Feminism was my deepest held belief and my mother used to call me her little banner waver. It's like I always had to have a cause. I was always fighting for a cause. I did environmentalism, Greenpeace, Save the Whales. They used to bring all the little birds that got hurt and the little animals in my neighborhood. I was going to work with animals my whole life. Everybody knew that about me. So I always had to have a cause and my cause was animals and also then women. It became a woman thing like I am never going to have anybody make fun of me or put me down or keep me down. I'm going to be who I want to be and I can be anything which you know yes and no, Like if you don't have the talent to do something, you can't do it right, you can't do it well, you can't make that your profession, make your living from it.

Sister Helena Burns:

So I think there's like a fine line between building women up and having a healthy self-esteem and not low self-esteem. But there's also this pride and this sort of like way over estimating one's gifts and talents and looks and everything. It's like no, we need to be humble, we need to be modest, All of those good qualities Christian qualities right that are in the Bible, and I really didn't have much input from my Catholic faith going to public schools. The media, such as it was back in my day, wasn't terribly developed no internet. It was enough, though, to send me all these messages that I was set upon by men and by the society that men created, and that also included religion. Like I saw religion as a man-made men. It was men who wrote the Bible, and they did it to keep women down and control women.

Sister Helena Burns:

I bought into every last bit of it, and so what that does to a woman is it makes her very angry inside. Now she may not be angry on the outside. I wasn't angry on the outside. I had my friends, I had a great life, I did a lot of hobbies and extracurricular activities after school and sports and everything.

Sister Helena Burns:

But down deep inside there's this simmering anger because you're rejecting you don't realize it but you're rejecting also what a woman actually is and saying that's unfair. It's unfair that God made us this way If you believe in a creator or the universe they like to say the universe today right, the universe did this to me, or whatever, and so that's kind of sad. You know you're angry. You're not resolving your issues because you can't. You can't resolve a lie unless you realize it's a lie.

Sister Helena Burns:

Now, men have not been sold this pack of lies and that's why men, even today, are reporting very comfortable levels of contentment and happiness. Women's levels of depression and feeling unfulfilled are like plummeting year after year. They're going down, down, down, down, down, down down. And these are the same women reporting this who have everything. They quote unquote, have it all, but they're exhausted. Right, there's the Helen Reddy song I am woman. There's a t-shirt says I am woman, I am strong, I can do anything, I am tired.

Sister Helena Burns:

So that's another story too, like this we're not going to get into, but the superwoman that's being held up to women, that they can be it all and do it all and have it all. No one can have it all. Men don't have it all. Fathers of families don't have it all. They might hate their job, but they do it because the money's good, right. They may want to take a promotion and move somewhere else, but they're not going to resettle the family. The kids like the school, and the wife has got her stuff going on. So you can't wake up. Till you wake up, you don't know you're being lied to, until you hear the truth. And it contrasts so much. And again I was given a false truth, a red herring, that the Church, again the Church wants you, barefoot and pregnant, to sit down and shut up. The Church doesn't value women, doesn't want to hear from women. The Bible is old hat. It's like it needs to be rewritten. Women are oppressed in the Bible. Just look at all these Bible passages and that's not it at all.

Sister Helena Burns:

The Bible is the word of God. It was written by the Holy Spirit through the male authors, yes, but if you look at the women in the Bible, oh my gosh, they are so amazing, every last one of them. And there was bad women. We got our Jezebels right. And these horrible women of the Bible. And there's horrible men in the Bible. The Bible is so honest. That's what I love about the Bible. The Apostles did not make themselves look good. I'll tell you that. They look very cowardly, you know, and all of that. So that's a whole nother topic. I do a little retreat on women of the Bible and how to read the Bible, not as a radical feminist, because all of us read it through this radical feminist lens. And then you don't want to have a biblical worldview, and if you don't have a biblical worldview, you don't understand your creator, you don't understand what's good for you.

Sister Helena Burns:

You don't understand reality and truth. So the ancient philosophers and I have a background in philosophy which I loved, but it couldn't help me with theology of the body. But the ancient philosophers used to say happiness is living in accord with your nature. Happiness is living in accord with your nature. And radical feminists are fighting their very nature, even though they don't realize it. So when I found theology of the body, I found peace. I started to find peace and this joy, this very deep joy, not just acceptance of being a woman, but joy in being a woman.

Sister Helena Burns:

And my full story is on my blog. There's a video testimony there. It's the first thing. On my blog, hellburnscom just like it sounds, h-e-l-l-b-u-r-n-scom I have a rather lengthy blog post that says how to Read your Way Out of Radical Feminism. And the very first thing is my video testimony, a long interview with Father Walter Hsu, of how this all fit together.

Sister Helena Burns:

And how did I become a nun in the midst of all this in a traditional community? You know, like how does that make sense? Well, I'll tell you, I hid my radical feminism because when I met Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament that's a whole other story I realized this is his church and I was so distraught. I didn't want to have to be Catholic, but he was talking to me from the Blessed Sacrament and I promised him that I would stop fighting the Catholic Church on all these women's issues and try to understand the church's teaching. And I thought it was going to be easy, especially after I entered the convent understand the church's teaching. And I thought it was going to be easy, especially after I entered the convent. I thought, oh, I'm going to take scripture and theology and good anthropology and whatnot and I'm going to understand what it means to be a woman. I'm going to understand the church's teaching on women, et cetera, et cetera in the Bible.

Sister Helena Burns:

And I did not. Nothing I found was helpful. In a sense it was even worse, it was like very unhelpful, helpful. In a sense it was even worse, it was like very unhelpful, and so it wasn't for many. So again, I hid my radical feminism, but it was all I had to go on. It was my inner framework, it's all I knew, and so I'll talk a little bit more about that. When we talk about how do you get out of radical feminism, one of the first things you have to do is replay those lies that you heard in your head, those assumptions, those slogans that you clung onto because you thought they were true and they gave you something to hang on to and something to sort of prop yourself up, and it was a way to think about yourself. But was it accurate?

Sheila Nonato:

Sister Helena, you mentioned about how the world has given women. I myself bought into the Radical Feminist worldview. It's given us Radical Feminism. Now the church gives us the feminine genius. What is the feminine genius?

Sister Helena Burns:

Great question. So the term "feminine genius was coined by none other than John Paul II the Great when he wrote his encyclical rather lengthy encyclical Mularis Dignitatem, on the dignity and vocation of women. And ladies got really excited Woo, feminine genius. And we had all these t-shirts and everyone's like, ah, what is it so, the word genius? We tend to think of it as being like super smart and having a high IQ. But if you look up what the word genius really means, it's having a quality of being really good at something. It may have nothing to do with the intellect, but you're just like almost a savant about something, and so a genius could be anything really. And so what John Paul II is talking, the feminine genius, is factory set right, and I think all women intuited that too. Like, when he says the feminine genius, he means we're all feminine geniuses just by virtue of being feminine. Right, being a woman. And that's what feminine means. It just means being a woman. It doesn't mean being more frou-frou than another woman and wearing high heels as opposed to not wearing high heels. That's not what feminine and femininity means. It just means what pertains to a woman, what pertains to all women. So I think it's important to understand that. So that's what the feminine genius is, and he outlines it in. You have to read the whole encyclical to really get the full picture. But I'm going to go over a few of the attributes or characteristics of the feminine genius, which is something we might say is also women's gifts. But first, before we do that, I want to just talk about masculinity and femininity in general, because we cannot talk about women in a vacuum. This was the problem with the radical feminists as well, and really all the waves of feminism. They just act like women are our own species. The waves of feminism, they just act like women are our own species. And we're doing this not vis-a-vis men, who complete the species, but we're going to figure this all out by ourselves. And again, even if you're married like I'm going to do my own thing and then I'm going to tell my spouse about it, I'm going to tell my husband what I'm going to be doing it's like that's not a partnership, that's not a marriage, you know. So there's a beautiful quote that I just really have to quote from Mulieris Dignitatem.

Sister Helena Burns:

This is Chapter Seven on the dignity and vocation of woman by John Paul II. He said man cannot exist alone and he he uses he because he, in English, can mean the totality of men and women. Man cannot exist alone, mean the totality of men and women. Man cannot exist alone. He, male and female can exist only as the unity of the two and therefore in relationship with another human person. Does this mean everyone has to be married? No, but when I'm in society, when I'm in my family, I'm relating differently to the men in my family than I am to the women. So we're always in relationship with other human persons. And there's two different types of human persons. There's two different ways to be a body. We don't have bodies, we are bodies. There's two different ways to be a body male and female, two different ways to be in the image of God. And we're going to talk about that too, because it's so easy to understand men in the image of God, and we're going to talk about that too, because it's so easy to understand men in the image of God. But what about women? How do women image God? Is it the same way? No, it's different. John Paul II says it is a question here of a mutual relationship man to woman, woman to man. Being a person in the image and likeness of God thus also involves existing in relationship in relation to the other.

Sister Helena Burns:

Now, in philosophy we know John Paul II is a big philosopher the other is very important. The other is the one who is not like me, the other who is not me and is not like me. And we have to reach out of ourselves to the other, always right. So, for example, even parents to their children. Your children are others, they're not just an extension of you, they are their own distinct little persons and personalities, and I'm sure you all have figured that out by now. So we never want to treat anyone our spouse, our friends or anyone as extensions or mirrors of ourselves. Everyone is the other, and males to females are even more other because we don't understand them. They are not quite like us, the men you know Now we have.

Sister Helena Burns:

I have to make this clear there is one human nature. This is what makes us equal, one human nature. This is what makes us equal and this is why a male savior, Jesus Christ, true God and true man, could die for both sexes. Right, the radical feminist? There's a whole theological radical feminism too that says crazy things like well, we need a female savior then, because if it's so important that Jesus is male, then he only died for men. No, we have one human nature. That's what makes us equal in dignity. Is this one human nature that he assumed, that God assumed in Jesus Christ? Okay, now I'm really going into teaching mode here, but that's okay. So men and women are equal, but different, and we are called to help each other, support each other, appreciate each other, supply for what the other does not have or cannot do, to put our strengths and weaknesses together, to work together. And there's a wonderful.

Sister Helena Burns:

If you don't like John Paul II's writing some people don't. They find it very intense and circular and meandering, and he uses a lot of big words sometimes and they prefer to read Ratzinger, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, get this encyclical online the Collaboration of Men and Women in Church and in Society, and it is so beautiful. It's like it's as though Ratzinger is now doing theology of the body. It's as though Ratzinger is now doing theology of the body. So does masculinity mean being rugged, tough and macho? No, it means everything that goes with being a man or a male, which naturally occurs in the body or soul of a man. It's going to look different on different men, because every man is unique in body and soul, but he's still male. He's still a man. He still possesses masculinity. Does femininity mean being sweet and delicate and frou-frou?

Sheila Nonato:

What does femininity mean? We're going to find out after this short break. It's the halfway mark here, so if you'd like to pause and return, please do, or keep going. Here's my son with a message to our listeners. Thank you for listening and supporting our podcast, apostolate. God bless.

Co-host:

If you like our podcast, please like, share and subscribe. You can also leave us a comment and a review, please. We'd love to hear from you.

Sheila Nonato:

Now let's get back to the conversation with Sister Helena Burns.

Sister Helena Burns:

Does femininity mean being sweet and delicate and frou-frou? No, now, some women are, and some women want to be. Knock yourself out. Some men are rugged, tough and macho. Does that make that's fine? Maybe it's the way they're born, the way they're built. Maybe it's what they've aspired to be and they've made themselves that that's fine. That's fine. It doesn't make them more masculine and frou-frou ladies. More feminine, because femininity and masculinity is not something we have to prove or acquire or attain. It is a given, it's God's gift to you.

Sister Helena Burns:

At the moment of your conception, you were either male or female. We were gendered at the moment of conception. That's science, that's biology, and so different women are going to look different. There's never going to be another you as a woman. There's never going to be another you as a woman. There's never going to be another you as a man. So just be yourself, embrace your incarnation of being a man or being a woman, and it's not a spectrum. Sexuality is not a spectrum. It's a binary male and female, and there's no ideal masculine or ideal feminine beyond Jesus and Mary that we are looking to for exemplars. We have to be ourselves.

Sister Helena Burns:

Yeah, there's a wonderful philosophical tenet. It is what it is. Now we say that casually in society. It is what it is meaning. But it means kind of the same thing in philosophy too. You can't change it. It is what it is, and but it means kind of the same thing in philosophy too. You can't change it. It is what it is and you need to just deal with it. Deal with it as it is. It is what it is. A rock can't suddenly become a tree. A tree can't suddenly become a car. It is what it is.

Sister Helena Burns:

A chair isn't a table. It's not designed to be a table. You could use it as a table. It's not designed to be a table. You could use it as a table. It's not going to be a very good table because it's not designed for that.

Sister Helena Burns:

So you are a unique man, a unique woman. There's not just one way to be a man or a woman. Everything you will do in life will be as the man you are. Now we're back to philosophy again, as what we do. We do as the thing, the creature, the person we are. We're so far away from the body we have moved so far away from concrete, physical reality, which is science and biology and creation. It's all of a piece and we live in our heads, we fantasize and we think we are a furry, I think I'm a dog, I think I'm a cat, I think I'm a non-neither. I'm a neither. I'm not a man nor a woman. I'm an alien. I'm a ghost.

Sister Helena Burns:

People are identifying as ghosts. Now I don't mean just LARPing, you know, like just play acting. I mean they really say that's my identity, this is who I am. Or they're making up their own fantastical creatures or beings.

Sister Helena Burns:

And what Ratzinger's also said, you know? He said we're living in a time of rebellion against the creator. People are saying I don't like the way you made me, I'm going to make myself, I'm going to remake myself, I'm going to create myself from the bottom up. And it's like no, that's so sad, Like that's you're not going to do it. Well, first of all, and that's such a slap across the face of our loving creator. You know he envisioned us from all eternity. We were in the mind of God as the person that we are. So it's only going to bring sorrow at the end of this path. Maybe it's going to give you some instant gratification or something, but it's only going to lead to sorrow. Because, again, what is happiness? It is living in accord with our nature, and that includes our personality, the personality God gave you. Now we want to acquire virtue too. So it's not like every wart and bump in our personality is good. We have to be acquiring virtue. We have to be becoming holy and sanctified through the grace of God and the sacraments. But let's remember this I love what the French say vive la différence, long live the difference between men and women.

Sister Helena Burns:

Stereotypes, especially today, can be very, very harmful. To say a man has to be like this, a woman has to be like that, and some of our young people are thinking that they have to transition, which can't be done male to female, female to male or even adults. Because I'm not a good man, I don't measure up, I'm not the way they use feminine. You know like I'm not like the other girls, I don't like to have long hair, I don't wear perfume, I don't wear makeup. That's fine. Who cares? That doesn't make you a woman.

Sister Helena Burns:

So yeah, so masculinity and femininity will look different according to each individual, but there are certain characteristics and traits that are of a male person or a female person, again, kind of factory set. I'm going to talk about the Feminine Genius, what that looks like according to John Paul II. And you might say to yourself well, I'm a woman and I don't have all of these things, that's okay. You might have them and not know it, they might be dormant, they might be underdeveloped. I'm not saying you have to necessarily work on them, but they're there and you might have some others more strongly.

Sister Helena Burns:

That I'm going to mention. And here's the thing You're still a woman. You will do all these things as the woman that you are. So he said that women express the feminine genius through interpersonal communication. And I'm going to stop here, too and say that again, science backs all this stuff up. You say, well, I'm an introvert, I'm a woman, I'm an introvert, I don't talk that much, that's okay. Introversion has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. That's a personality trait. But we know that women in general use 13,000 more words a day than men. Also, in the womb, with this testosterone wash I was talking about, you know what it does? It goes to the communication center of the baby boy's brain and it kills half of that. So this is why men are usually not big talkers or they're not like fast talkers or multitasking talkers. Some men are, but that's not biologically who they are. Do you know what I'm saying? So, yes, we're speaking in generalities about these characteristics, but there's science to back this up Biology and sociology.

Sister Helena Burns:

Women are receptive. Women are receptive. Now, that again is factory set. Our bodies are receptive to men, to new life and hey, our cycles go by the moon. We are very in tune with nature, very, very fine tuned, very receptive to nature around us. Empathy part of the feminine genius is empathy. Now, we don't want to either feminize things like empathy and say, well, men don't have empathy, oh, they most certainly do. You know like a woman would nurture a child? But that man might protect the child right, or he might say good job, son. Or you can come on, honey, you can get up back on that bike again. You'll be, you'll be fine, you'll be okay. There's different ways to express them and we don't want to.

Sister Helena Burns:

Some people say, some feminists say, why are you dwelling on the differences and why don't we just focus on what's the same? Well, we can do both, let's do both. But you keep saying that there is no difference between men and women. And so that's why we want to point out there are some differences Tenderness, attention to detail. We even I'm going to keep interrupting with the science.

Sister Helena Burns:

So women have what are called. We both have C cells and P cells in our eyes, and women have more of the C cell which we can track things in our vicinity, our close proximity, our close vicinity, much better than men have, because we have more of the C cells. Men have a lot more of the P cells which tracks things at a distance with their eyes. So even our eyes. You say well, eyes are eyes are eyes. Eyeballs are eyeballs. No, they're not. Women's eyes are different than men's eyes. Men's eyes are wired directly to their brain so that they get sexually stimulated more by their eyes than women do. These are facts. These are not and they're not excuses. These are just biological facts and because we have to practice virtue, we have to control our biology and form our biology and keep it in check, et cetera. We don't just go with the flow, men. Why could possibly men have all of these P cells in their eyes to track things at a distance?

Sister Helena Burns:

Predators, right. Men protect. Hunting Men were always traditionally the hunters, right. Women were the gatherers and farmers Danger, always traditionally the hunters right. Women were the gatherers and farmers Danger. And hockey pucks, right. Okay, so we're still working on these characteristics of the feminine genius Caregiving Intuition.

Sister Helena Burns:

That's a fact. Women have intuition. It's real. Women's intuition is real. Men have insight into how things work and women have intuition into people, how people work, humanizing and personalizing problems and situations. They've done so many studies on how women problem solve as to how men problem solve, women always personalize. How is this decision going to affect people? That's kind of important, huh. How is it going to affect the vulnerable? How is it going to affect people? That's kind of important, huh. How is it going to affect the vulnerable? How is it going to affect families? Men might just be focusing on the bottom line when they problem solve, or what's practical or utilitarian.

Sister Helena Burns:

We need women's gifts of problem solving, multitasking. Women's brains are again science. Both sides of our brain fire constantly back and forth, just rapidly back and forth. That makes us good at multitasking. And women the roles that women have to play because of our biology, that we need to play, that we do play and most women want to play involve multitasking, lots of multi-tasking. We are doing 10 things at once at all moments. Right, we can follow several conversations going on at the same time. We can't even go to bed at night because our mind is just firing constantly. It's hard to fall asleep.

Sister Helena Burns:

Right, men's brains they use one side of the brain and then they shut it off and use the other side of the brain. They do not do the switching very quickly. Does that make them dumb and stupid? No, it means that they have to be monomaniacally focused on the tasks that they are cut out for. That they are designed for, that they play and do in society and usually like to do and play, naturally, in society, because if they don't focus on just one thing at a time, they're going to get hurt. People are going to get hurt, okay.

Sister Helena Burns:

So you might say I don't possess any of these gifts. Well, I have a hard time believing that. You don't have any empathy or you don't have any attention to detail or whatever it is, and maybe, like me, you suffocated those voices. I pushed down. I would feel my own feminine reactions bubbling up to situations and all those voices in my head that came, unfortunately, yes, from men, but also from radical feminists. It was like they were just like parroting what the men said. They would say, oh, oh, that's emotional. You know, you're just being emotional, as though emotions are bad, right. They would say, oh, that's weak, that's you have to be. Think rationally and logically.

Sister Helena Burns:

Now, I tend to do that anyway. I think that's really a part of me and that's fine. It's just who I am. Doesn't make me less a woman, less feminine, because that's a factory set. I do my logical, philosophical thinking, objective thinking, thinking in generalities and not particulars. As a woman, I do it as a woman, but I have a lot of these other gifts of women, a lot of the other feminine genius. It's okay, it's all right. You are a woman. You're not more a woman or less a woman.

Sister Helena Burns:

And I have some other fun things that I usually talk about, some of the female stuff that I do have and some of the things that I don't have. And it's kind of funny, right. So how many sitcoms are based on the male-female difference? The good ones don't put men down, the truly funny and good ones don't put men down. But so many plays and shows and movies are based on these differences that we know exist.

Sister Helena Burns:

And I think married couples, they get it right away oh boy, are we different, okay, so, in general, men civilize the world to make it habitable for everyone. Women civilize people to make them habitable for everyone. There's an old saying the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. See, and the feminists would come back and say, oh, that's just because you want us to stay at home. No, think about it. That's really true.

Sister Helena Burns:

Whoever raises a child from their youngest years, if you have a child in your care for three to five years, you have formed their most basic experiences of the world right. And if you're talking to this kid and forming their personality, I mean letting them be who they are, but got with guidance, right and help, and they're going to ask you questions and you're going to help them think about things. You're going to give them critical thinking skills. This is a really beautiful phrase that I just heard more recently the glory of woman is to form the minds of men. How about that? So we forget? It's not just about soccer and the orthodontist and doing this, that Chinese lessons and violin lessons. It's about forming their character, helping them form their own character, teaching them right from wrong, teaching them to care about other people, having them really develop, say, one hobby that they're really good at. It's not just about what's going to make them a lot of money in the future, but what do they love to do? What has God put in your child and in your child's personality that is so unique that you can foster? So I'm going to just go back over one aspect of how, or the main aspect of how, men image God and how women image God, and I think this is key and this was one of my big pieces of the puzzle, one of my big stepping stones to getting out of radical feminism and into theology of the body.

Sister Helena Burns:

We can tell what something is and what it does based on its design. If you look at a man's body, it's more angular, even if he's short and he's a slight build. His bones are different, his muscles are different. This is why it's unfair to have biological males competing against women. They take all the prizes right. They take first, second and third place. They take the scholarships because they're faster, they can endure more, they can lift more All of that stuff. Their bodies are made differently in every aspect. Almost every cell in our bodies is also gendered.

Sister Helena Burns:

We used to think that, oh, men and women have hearts, like I was talking about the eyeballs. Oh, they both have hearts. So they did all the studies on men's hearts and then they found out oops, women have heart attacks different from men. Their hearts are different. Women recover from strokes different from men. Women recover from concussions differently from men. We are so different even in the body parts that are similar. Why do these forensic shows? They go find a tibia or a femur out in the woods. They can tell you exactly if that is a male or female bone and how old it was and everything Okay. So women's bodies are softer and more rounded, which tells you what she is designed for.

Sister Helena Burns:

I don't want to go to the whole background of where I discovered this, but when this happened it was at a conference and so many light bulbs went on in my head and I was saying wait a minute. I who love nature, I who love animals, I accept that there's male and female in the animal world. Why am I not accepting male and female differences in the human world? Why am I putting myself outside of nature, outside of even science? Why am I doing that? That doesn't make sense. And it was actually a priest who was an artist, a Byzantine priest, a Father. Thomas Loya, who was one of my theology, turned out to be one of my theology, the body mentors. After that, he was showing us how the bodies are designed differently and he wasn't referring even to fertility at this point. And I so appreciated that because again, here's a radical feminist complaint.

Sister Helena Burns:

All they do is talk about women's fertility. They never talk about men and fertility at the same time, in the same breath. It's almost like men's fertility is floating out there and we don't look at a man and say, oh, he could be a father someday. It's like they get to be free and we're not free. We're tied down because everybody looks at us and looks at our bodies and thinks fertility, babies. Now, it is true, women have the lion's share of fertility. We do. We have the monthly cycles, we have the pain and peril of childbirth, we are pregnant for nine months, we nurse all of that. That's the lion's share of sexuality. Is that a burden and a curse, or it is a privilege? Or is it a privilege?

Sister Helena Burns:

Okay, so what we call the design of men, we call the design of men, body and soul, is transcendence. This is how men image God. Women image God through imminence I-M-M-A-N-E-N-C-E imminence. What are these two things? What do they mean? And you know it's a no brainer, the way that men image God, why? Well, god is the masculine principle. He revealed himself as the masculine principle. God is beyond gender. Gender is a human thing, not a human construct. It's a real thing. Sex and gender are the same thing, they're not different. So sex God is beyond sex, but he revealed himself as father, right With male terminology. And Jesus is truly male. He became a real male in every way, shape and form and his resurrected body is still male for all eternity in heaven. So that's kind of a no-brainer right. We got the father. We have the son. Jesus came as a male Even before the incarnation. He was Son. Second person of the Trinity is the Son of the Father. So how do women image God? That was a big question for me, like why do we speak about God in male terminology? Well, he self-revealed that way and again.

Sister Helena Burns:

I could go on for hours about this and I would love to, but you can check it out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, number 239 and 2779. It talks more about this. 239 and 2779, imminence and transcendence. So what is transcendence? Transcendence is going out of oneself, going beyond oneself. Transcendence is going out of one's self, going beyond oneself, encountering and bettering the world by going out and working on it.

Sister Helena Burns:

Now you could say, well, women do that too to a degree. But who really? Come on? Come on, let's be honest. Who are the construction workers who build the cities, who do that physical work, laying water pipes down? Dirty jobs. You know Mike Rowe and his show Dirty Jobs. You see women emptying septic tanks. I don't why? Because they're being discriminated against and they're not allowed. No, most women don't even want to, and not just because they're dirty jobs.

Sister Helena Burns:

I don't want to confuse the issue here. Women are not. They don't have the strength in their bodies to lift some of the things that construction workers have to lift. Right, they're not interested in this stuff. It just doesn't appeal to them. They're not maybe good at it, whatever. But there are women architects, there are women engineers, but some of the physical work women just don't have the capability to do that. Right, if she can go for it, if you can do the job but we are not going to change the standards of the job just so you can live your dream, honey, okay, go for it. But if you can't and most women can't you should not be putting that heavy stuff on and trying to do that fireman's job, that firefighter's job, all right, it's okay, it's all right to let the men do what they're good at and women do what they're good at.

Sister Helena Burns:

I'll tell you when I lived in Chicago, we lived downtown and we had a 42-story building going up directly behind us and it was surrounded by buildings. So they had to do this. They had to tear down, implode the building that was there without hurting anything else. And they had to rise up that building right, just straight up in the air, out of the ground, and there were no men, excuse me, no women that we could see. Maybe behind the scenes there were plenty of women, but the men that were out there, it was all men constructing that building, but there was one woman. You know what she did? She was the crane operator and that doesn't require a lot of physical strength, but boy, is that an important job, right? She was lifting up those steel girders and stuff Fascinating, fascinating.

Sister Helena Burns:

So trying to push women into STEM? You know science, technology, math. Well, yeah, there might be some good jobs there and everything. But why are you saying there has to be 50% women in a certain field? It doesn't make sense. Let the women who want to go there and are good at it go there. Make sure they have opportunities, make sure women and girls understand that this is a great field to get into if they have the aptitude. But this idea, everything has to be 50-50. It's okay to have a division of labor. It's okay to let women do what they're good at and men do what they're good at, okay. So back to transcendence.

Sister Helena Burns:

What does transcendence mean? Like I said, going out of oneself, going beyond oneself, encountering and bettering the world by working on it. Men's sexuality is external to their bodies. That's part of transcendence. This means something, because the body has meaning. The body already has meaning. We don't assign the body meaning. The body already has meaning.

Sister Helena Burns:

What are some ways that men express transcendence? Sports, throwing things. Everything is a projectile with guys. Have you ever noticed that? Spitting disgusting, we could spit. Women can spit. We never do. It's disgusting and gross. But men are always spitting Construction, building, going out into nature, things like camping, fishing, hunting, video games to a degree, although it's just virtual, always wanting to fix the problem, get her done, being singularly focused on tasks, zoning out in man caves that is a part of transcendence. What if the man doesn't? He's not interested in these particular activities? It's okay, he has them in some degree. He's still a man. He will do everything as he does as a man. He will express his transcendence as a man in his study, home life, family life, work, business, arts, media, technology, travel, hobbies, friendships, et cetera.

Sister Helena Burns:

Now, women image God's imminence means here and now, in the moment, totally present, not out there. You know, men are the explorers. And you know all this going out, out, out, women make the world a better place by drawing it to themselves and working on it. That way, we women, we can dominate in our own way. I ask men, my audiences, I'll say guys, have you ever been dominated by a woman? Do you find you know women dominating? Oh yeah, we have our own ways by pervading all things. I always say we're like the sunshine, we're like the air and the water. Women are so resilient and resourceful, we kind of permeate everything. The way I like to think of it is men are the brick and we are the mortar. You know, we keep everything together. We connect everyone and everything. Men are the stalwart bricks that support everything and do their job, and bricks just pile on top of each other, are going to fall down and mortar by itself is just a big heaping mass of cement. Right, we need each other.

Sister Helena Burns:

Another aspect of imminence is again designed based on the design of a woman's body. Our sexuality is internal to our bodies and that means something, because the body means something. The body already has a meaning of its own. We don't have to assign it a new meaning or try to take away the meaning that it has. We're a mystery even to ourselves, because we can't see inside our bodies even right.

Sister Helena Burns:

The Bible talks about. You formed me, o Lord, you know, in the darkness and the mystery of my mother's womb. I don't know how you did it. The mother of the Maccabees, the seven Maccabee sons, she said I don't know how you were formed in my womb. Please don't apostatize against our faith, because God is the one who made you. I didn't even make you. I don't know how you were made.

Sister Helena Burns:

Women are not physically stronger than men. We are stronger in our ability to endure pain and we are emotionally stronger than men because we process our emotions better. We talk about it, we get it out, we go to our friends. Now, part of that is cultural too. Men are told not to cry, to keep it bottled up, and some of the other things that I also mentioned about women in those characteristics, with the science to back it up, about what is the feminine genius. Does this make women superior to men? No, are men superior to women? No, we're just different. We are the way God made us to be.

Sister Helena Burns:

I would highly recommend that you go online and check out a woman named Vicki Thorne, V-i-c-k-i Thorne without an E. She founded Project Rachel, which is for post-abortion healing. She died rather young. She was a good friend of mine. She had a stroke and died but she moved on from like cause.

Sister Helena Burns:

The post-abortion healing really took off and in the US the bishops really supported this project and got it into the parishes and the dioceses and it really took off post-abortion healing for both women and men. And she moved on to do the biology of the theology of the body. So some of the science facts I got from her. That's all she does and she goes into. She used to go onto secular campuses and just they would beg to have her come because people don't know this stuff. We should know about our bodies, how amazing they are, and I think that would make us love our bodies more, both as men and women, if we started to understand how amazing we are and how different we are, the beauty in that difference. So check out Vicki Thorne, her biology of the theology of the body. She has some YouTube videos on that.

Sheila Nonato:

Thank you to Sister Helena for this masterclass on the theology of the body and sharing her story about leaving Radical Feminism after learning about her feminine identity in Christ. Join us for part two, where we pick up the conversation, where she guides us on how to read our way out of radical feminism, which is the false belief that women are oppressed in the home and their vocation as a wife and mother. How do we achieve true freedom? Sister Helena will chat with us next time. Please join us. Thank you and God bless. Thank you for listening to the Veil and Armour podcast.

Co-host:

I invite you to share this with another Catholic mom today. Please subscribe to our podcast and YouTube channel and please spread the word. Let's be brave, let's be bold and be blessed together.

People on this episode

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

The Catholic Sobriety Podcast Artwork

The Catholic Sobriety Podcast

Christie Walker | The Catholic Sobriety Coach