2025 Women’s Conference celebrates sacred beauty – women’s identity as God’s beloved

Presented by Salt & Light Radio, the conference, themed ‘Rejoice in Hope,’ was held Saturday, Sept. 6, drawing more than 750 in-person participants and another 300 virtually, either individually or through watch parties. (ICR photo/Vero Gutiérrez)

By Emily Woodham

Staff Writer

Embracing the call as beautiful, beloved daughters of God, renouncing lies and affirming truth were common threads at this year’s Idaho Catholic Women’s Conference.

Although none of the speakers collaborated on their presentations, each felt called in their pre-conference prayers to affirm women in their beauty, encourage them to renounce lies that mar their identity in Christ and inspire women to courageously live in Christ’s loving truth.

Presented by Salt & Light Radio, the conference, themed Rejoice in Hope, was held Saturday, Sept. 6, at Holy Apostles Parish in Meridian, drawing more than 750 in-person participants and another 300 virtually, either individually or through watch parties.

“We wanted to give people hope and for souls to be fed,” said Carol Brown, director of marketing and community relations at Salt & Light Radio. “We wanted people to experience healing and for things to go smoothly. Based on the surveys, mission accomplished!”

Mass kicks off conference

Idaho Bishop Peter F. Christensen celebrated Mass to open the conference, which drew more new participants than previous years, especially young women and mothers, according to Brown.

From left, Father Goodluck Ajaero, SMMM; Deacon Steven Rayburn; Bishop Peter Christensen; Deacon David Shackley; Father Caleb Vogel; and Father Vitalis Onyeama, SMMM, during the celebration of Holy Mass. (ICR photo/Vero Gutiérrez)

“These days, it seems like all of us are spending a lot of time rushing to the next thing,” Bishop Peter said in his homily. “We often forget to take the time to reflect, pray, meditate and call upon God. In doing so, we fail to let our minds and hearts be in sync with God, and our emotions become more and more raw. We become vulnerable and apt to believe lies about ourselves. Lies spoken to us from years past and piling up even today.”

Too often, he said, people focus on the negative.

“The problem is, my sisters, if we hear the negative enough, we can begin to believe it,” Bishop Peter said. “The most common lie is, ‘You are not good enough.’”

The antidote to negativity, he said, is encouragement in the truth.

“We need encouragement in our lives,” he affirmed. “Every person you and I meet has a heavy burden. Each human soul harbors unseen wounds and unspoken fears.”

Bishop Peter most recently witnessed the power of encouragement at breakfast in a hotel. He saw a young mother struggling with her baby at a table when an older woman spoke up and told her, “You are a good mother.” The young mother instantly teared up as the older woman continued to encourage her and even hugged her.

Bishop Peter waited until the young mother had left the dining room before speaking privately with the older woman about what he had witnessed.

“She called these deliberate acts of encouragement for people she meets; [they are] her ‘micro drops of joy,’” he related. “She does this simply because she feels people need to be lifted up.”

Though small, they can be powerful in bringing courage to others, he said, adding that it is also a way to fulfill a command in Scripture: “Encourage yourselves daily while it is still ‘today,’ so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin” (Hb. 3:13).

“St. Paul doesn't say encourage occasionally or just when it's convenient to do so, but daily,” he emphasized. “The culture we're living in so easily tears people down. We need to build each other up. We need to make encouragement a part of our regular flow of speech.”

Discouragement is a soul crusher, but to give encouragement is to live in the life of the Holy Spirit, he explained.

“Encouragement is a beautiful way to allow the Spirit to work through us, to collaborate with God, because God is not about tearing us down; He is building us up.”

To encourage one another is to spread truth to others and affirm their identity as a truly beloved child of God.

“The Lord says to each of you, ‘Take courage. Fear not, my beloved daughter. Fear not; I am with you.’ Let this enter into your hearts. Take this as a gift, use it and be healed.”

At the opening of the Idaho Women’s Conference, Padre Pio’s relic was displayed at Holy Apostles Parish in Meridian for veneration. (ICR photo/Vero Gutiérrez)

Crystalina Evert

Evert, an international speaker and author, delivered two talks at the conference. She and her husband, Jason, are co-founders of the Chastity Project, an organization dedicated to promoting chastity and healthy relationships among young people.

“I have found traveling all over the world and speaking with women that 90 percent of women are not living out the gifts that God has given them,” Evert said. “I myself am still learning my gifts and growing into them.”

Wherever she has been, she has found that women have a lot of wounds and brokenness.

“There's a lot of sin that we hold on to that stifles our spiritual growth and does not allow us to actually step into what we were created for.”

Evert shared her testimony with the audience. When she was 2, her father left their family. When she was 11, her grandfather, to whom she had looked up, also left the family. The pattern of men in her family history abandoning their wives and children deeply wounded her identity, she said.

“When I was young, I learned the lie at a very young age that love doesn't last, but I couldn’t wait to find ‘the one.’ So, at the age of 15, I lost my virginity,” she revealed. “I thought having sex was going to cause this huge, emotional bond, and we'd be on cloud nine and so in love. But slowly I realized he was just using me. After a while, I realized he was cheating on me. We broke up. We went our separate ways.”

Evert felt like she was “damaged goods” after breaking up with her boyfriend. To escape the pain, she turned to partying, drugs and alcohol. “I just lost myself completely,” she said. “I was miserable. I hated myself. My friends would always say, ‘Oh, it's all fun and games.’ Well, the next day, when the fun and games were over, I was disgusted with myself.”

Her mother insisted she go to a chastity presentation at a church. Evert reluctantly went. However, she quickly realized the event had a message of redemption that she needed.

“The speaker had done the same things I had done, but he had peace, joy and confidence,” she explained. “He wasn't ashamed of himself. And it was that day that I said I was going to start respecting my body, start respecting God and get my standards out of the gutter.”

Her conversion wasn’t easy, but she knew God loved her and was calling her to a better life.

“God wants you exactly where you're at,” she said. “He wants you to invite Him into your brokenness, those wounds, all those places that you want to hide from the world. He sees it all. There's no age limit on your purpose, in your mission that God has given you.”

Evert became involved with the chastity ministry as a speaker and met her husband, Jason Evert. When they married, she felt she was having a fresh start and that life would be “happily ever after.” However, in the stress of raising children and running a household, she realized that her healing journey was not over.

“I was under construction. I was a hot mess,” she testified. “I was doing all the things: going to confession, Mass and adoration. Then one day in adoration, I heard the Lord tell me, ‘Go to counseling.’”

At first, Evert refused to seek a counselor, but eventually acquiesced. Each session, she found, was affirmation that she was fulfilling God’s plan for her, the decision becoming a pivotal moment in her journey toward healing.

“Each of us can hear God’s voice. Even when we keep ourselves distanced from Jesus and what He calls us to do, He is still speaking to us, and we can hear Him,” she said. “If you say you can’t hear Him, I don’t believe you because when I was at my worst, drunk or high out of my mind back in high school, I knew I heard God’s voice saying, ‘Leave. Stop. Don’t do that.’ My conscience was still alive, even though I felt dead inside.”

Hearing God’s voice and obeying Him is essential to our growth. Unfortunately, too often, she explained, we listen to the negative voices in our head that accuse us and tell us lies about ourselves, from our looks to our intelligence and worth.

“It’s unreal how we dissect ourselves and how we take on those lies about ourselves, but God is whispering to us to counter those lies,” Evert said.

As we allow those lies to take hold, we give way to fear.

“Fear is the seed of evil: if the devil can make you fearful and not believe what God is telling you about who you are, then you become your own worst enemy,” she said, adding that Catholic counseling helped her to discern the lies and end toxic relationships and thinking.

She also found a quick way to fight the devil’s lies, by declaring out loud, “Jesus, speak the truth to me.” Emily Wilson, another Catholic speaker, told Evert that “the devil hates the name of Jesus, and he hates the truth. And Jesus will tell you the truth.”

Through her journey, Evert found confession, adoration and counseling to be essential in her healing.

“There are no shortcuts,” she said. “But you are not doing this alone. You are going with Jesus.”

Through healing, women receive the freedom to be their true selves.

“Do not underestimate the power of your own testimony to the world and what God wants to do through you,” she urged. “Your light was made to shine. Your self-worth is within you and has been given to you for a purpose. Your beauty was given to you for a great reason as well. It is time to rise up unafraid of who you are and embrace who you are.”

Sister Maria Goretti

Sister Maria, who belongs to the order of the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart in Los Angeles, also spoke at the conference.

“Every single one of you are absolutely ravishing to the Lord,” Sister Maria Goretti said, sharing a reflection from speaker Father John Burns of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee on the primary call of Eve in the book of Genesis.

“In the first moments of Eve's existence, the scripture says God brought her to the man,” she explained. “That means that when Eve was created, she was alone with the Father and no one else. As she was created, the only One who communicated her dignity, identity and beauty to her was the Father. As the Father created her and gazed on her, Eve gazed back at the Father alone and knew she was beautiful and knew that she was created to be a delight.”

As Eve was created, so each of us are created and affirmed with the Father’s delight.

“Ladies, you are created to be gazed upon with delight, the purest delight that there is,” she attested. “The only loving gaze that is going to be able to communicate to you your identity and your full beauty and full worth is going to be that of your Heavenly Father, because that is how we were made.”

When she was young, Sister Maria said she loved dressing up and being beautiful.

“Beauty is a part of your essence as a woman,” she said. “You need to know this about yourself, which is why God has it all over Scripture.”

When she entered the convent, her desire to be beautiful remained, but external affirmation of her beauty was no longer the source of her identity. Beauty, she said, is not something that women should be ashamed of or try to run away from.

“Our beauty is sacred. Your beauty is sacred on all levels of the way that God created you,” she continued. Each woman, body and soul, is beautiful.

There can be a shame around wanting to be delighted in because women think it’s vain to desire that, she added. “You think that's vanity, but ladies, it's holy.”

Because of the fear of becoming vain or the fear of falling into lust and using beauty in wrong ways, women can become afraid of the desire of their hearts to be delighted in and to be beautiful, she explained.

“But the Father is telling you, ‘Do not be afraid. You are beautiful. Show me your face. Let me see you. You are lovely,’” she said, adding that holiness is what makes women beautiful. “A woman who is in love radiates because she knows she's beautiful in the eyes of her beloved. That's why she's so radiant. She knows her beloved calls her beautiful. It's the same thing for us with God.”

To receive this gift of God’s gaze, we must listen to His voice.

“Whichever voice you give more time to is the voice that’s going to take over,” Sister Maria said. “So, if you’re not giving primacy of place to the voice of your Father in Jesus, other voices are going to take over.”

The Father wants to speak truth to each of us, she added.

“You are beautiful. No matter what you've done, where you've been, and where you are right now, that is the way your Father sees you,” Sister Maria said. “But the thing is, you're not going to be able to fully receive that unless you're looking at Him in prayer on a regular basis.”

Receiving our true identity as beautiful, beloved daughters of God is a lifelong journey of healing.

“Healing is not about being fixed. If Jesus wants to bring healing and freedom to your beautiful hearts, it's for intimacy with Himself.”

Our wounds become open doors for intimacy with Jesus Christ, but first we must give Him permission to enter in.

“Letting Jesus into these places can take time, and that is OK,” Sister Maria said. “It can take years for certain wounds in our hearts, certain things He needs to work through to heal, and that's all right because He just wants to be with you in the journey.”