Women's Conference: Susan Conroy encourages women to pour out their love

By Christina Galeone
CFP Correspondent

    WORCESTER – At the 2018 Worcester Catholic Women’s Conference, the last presentation of the day was given by Susan Conroy, the author of “Mother Teresa’s Lessons of Love and Secrets of Sanctity” and several other inspirational books. She once worked with St. Teresa of Kolkata by helping her serve the “poorest of the poor” in India, and she discovered what makes someone a saint.
    “A saint is filled with the fullness of God,” she told the audience near the beginning of her presentation. “A saint is full of love. And love pours out. Because that’s what love does.”
    Her presentation “Learning from the Saints How to Love and Serve God” gave audience members insight into how to let their love for God pour out into the world. Through sharing what she learned from St. Teresa, she illuminated a path for women that the saints have all traveled upon.
    As she recounted her life-changing experience of meeting and working with Mother Teresa, when Ms. Conroy was a 21-year-old college student on summer break, she revealed that her mother inadvertently inspired her journey by leaving the saint’s books all over the family home for her 10 children to read. She later spoke of how God provided funding for the trip through a grant she learned about in college and how – even though she didn’t speak Hindi – he guided her to Mother Teresa through many Indian people who recognized that she was an American and assumed she was there to find the saintly woman.    
    With great emotion, she noted that one of the things she admires the most about the saint is her humble heart. She illustrated one of the ways she maintained that humble attitude by sharing what the saint said to her Missionaries of Charity.
    “She said to her Sisters ‘Your primary vocation is to belong to Jesus Christ, and your secondary vocation is to serve the poorest of the poor and to express that love for Jesus Christ by pouring it onto the poor around you,’” Ms. Conroy recalled, noting that she came to the realization that it was her primary vocation as well. She added, “It should be the primary vocation of every single woman here in the audience today.”  
    In realizing that vocation, Ms. Conroy learned a more important definition of success than the American dream of material prosperity. She also reflected on her dad’s belief and the belief of St. Catherine of Siena that it’s important to remember where we come from and where we’re going.
    “We’re created to know him, to love him and serve him, so that we can be reasonably happy in this life and extremely happy in the next,” she said. “When you grasp the basics of life … it gives you such stability. It gives you such inner strength. It gives you such purpose that we should all be walking with great purpose in life and a very great clarity.”
    She recounted how that clarity enabled her to serve people in places such as St. Teresa’s Home for the Dying. She shared how she wanted to show them that she loved them through her actions. And she explained how she learned how to love more deeply by serving a group of orphans who weren’t able to show their love and appreciation.
     She later shared with the audience how St. Teresa of Kolkata’s actions were rooted in love and prayer – the latter of which the saint attributed to her ability to continue her great work.
    “When I watched her shine her love on others … I not only called her a living saint, I called Mother Teresa a living prayer,” Ms. Conroy said. She added, “Mother Teresa lives her prayers.”
    And after asking the women in the audience to encourage each other in their faith and good works, just as St. Teresa and St. John Paul II did, and just as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare of Assisi did, she closed her presentation with a recitation of Blessed Cardinal Newman’s prayer “Radiating Christ,” a prayer that St. Teresa frequently said with her Missionaries of Charity. Ms. Conroy also offered a personal prayer when she asked God to help her and the women in the audience to “let Christ shine and to be the light of the world.

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