Ave Maria Radio presents Christ is the answer with Father John Ricardo.

One of my favorite things to do as a priest is to journey with our brothers and sisters as they explore becoming Catholic in the RCIA program.

The oddity is that oftentimes those who come into the church are the best educated Catholics that

there are. It seems that what we need is something like R-CIA for Catholics, for those of us

who have grown up with the faith and have never really learned it. So I invite you to join

those coming into the church as they learn about the beauty of our faith and hope as well that

it will help to draw you ever closer to the God

who is truth and love.

The topic for tonight is what's known as the prophetic vocation of woman, what I subtitled

the urgent need for authentic feminism.

Some of us may be shocked to know that the church promotes feminism.

And the late Holy Father, Pope John Paul the Great, was continually calling for either what he called a new feminism or an authentic feminism, as opposed to kind of the radical feminism, which in many ways is simply something like Marxist philosophy gone haywire, or applied to the relationships between men and women.

That might be a bit simplistic, but that's really what it is in its radical state.

And as I mentioned at Mass and in the article for tonight just trying to get us ready for the evening,

this is either the best or the worst kept secret that the church has.

I'm continually impressed by how many

women and men who begin to read the church's documents, particularly the church's documents,

whether it's the 20th anniversary of the Pope's apostolic letter on the dignity and the vocation

of women, whether it's his letter to women, things which no one would ever see, unfortunately, even though it's out there, it's available for people to read, pastors, associates, deacons, DREs, everybody should be promoting this. No one's ever exposed to it. You'll never see it in the Catholic school. It's just something which is totally unknown to most people. Then they begin to read it, and we begin to read it, and we go, why hasn't anybody ever told me this?

Why has this never been something to which I was exposed?

But instead, we kind of get snippets and soundbites from the media or from people who have as a goal or as an agenda to challenge the church and to reject the church's teachings on different things.

And that's our source for our information about what it is that the church says about women.

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