Keynote speakers at “The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman” conference, held Jan. 9-10, 2026, in Houston (left to right): Erika Bachiochi, Mary Eberstadt, Angela Franks, Pia de Solenni, and Leah Sargeant. | Credit: Photo courtesy of the University of St. Thomas
Jan 18, 2026 / 10:26 am (CNA).
This past week, nearly a quarter of U.S. states sued the federal government for defining biological sex as binary, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against legally allowing males to compete against females in sports, and a Vatican official called surrogacy a “new form of colonialism” that commodifies women and their children.
These are just the latest legal and cultural effects of a “mass cultural confusion” surrounding the meaning and purpose of the human body, and particularly women’s bodies, according to Leah Jacobson, program coordinator of the Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.
On Jan. 9–10, the program sponsored a symposium titled “The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman,” which brought together a group of Catholic women who have used their gifts of intellect and faith to serve as what Jacobson calls an “antidote” to the “chaos and confusion” of the cultural moment.
The speakers presented on a wide range of topics concerned with the beauty, truth, and necessity of the Church’s teachings on human sexuality, while also acknowledging how difficult living according to those teachings can sometimes be.
‘Each of these acts is an act of human subtraction’
In one of the first talks, writer Mary Eberstadt argued that the question “Who am I?” became harder to answer due to the widespread use of the birth control pill, which has led to huge increases in abortion, divorce, fatherlessness, single parenthood, and childlessness.
“Each of these acts is an act of human subtraction,” Eberstadt said. “I’m not trying to make a point about morality, but arithmetic.”
“The number of people we can call our own” became smaller, she said.
While she acknowledged that not everyone has been affected equally, “members of our species share a collective environment. Just as toxic waste affects everyone," she said, the reduction in the number of human connections “amounts to a massive disturbance to the human ecosystem,” leading to a crisis of human identity.
This reduction in the number of people in an individual's life, she argued, resulted in widespread confusion over gender identity and the meaning and purpose of the body.
Eberstadt also attributed the decline in religiosity to the smaller number of human connections modern people have.
“The sexual revolution subtracted the number of role models,” she said. “Many children have no siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles, no father; yet that is how humans conduct social learning.”
“Without children, adults are less likely to go to church,” she said. “Without birth, we lose knowledge of the transcendent. Without an earthly father, it is hard to grasp the paradigm of a heavenly father.”
‘A love deficit’
“Living without God is not liberating people,” she continued. “It’s tearing some individuals apart, making people miserable and lonely.”
When the sexual revolution made sex "recreational and not procreative, what it produced above all is a love deficit,” Eberstadt said.
At the same time, secularization produced “troubled, disconnected souls drifting through society without gravity, shattering the ability to answer ‘Who am I?’”
“The Church is the answer to the love deficit because Church teachings about who we are and what we’re here for are true,” she said.
She concluded with a final note on hope, saying “it is easy to feel embattled, but we must never lose sight of the faces of the sexual revolution’s victims,” she said, “who are sending up primal screams for a world more ordered than many of today’s people now know; more ordered to mercy, to community and redemption.”
The Church’s teachings were ’truly beautiful’ but 'very, very hard to live'
Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who has taught a class for the graduate program, shared her experience as a mother of seven who tried to live according to the Church’s “difficult” teachings.
As her children began to arrive at “a breakneck pace” and each pregnancy was “a bit of a crucible,” Bachiochi said being a mother was “very hard” for her, partly due to wounds from her youth (among other troubles, her own mother had been married and divorced three times), and partly because of a lack of community.
Echoing Eberstadt’s “arithmetic” problem, Bachiochi described having very few examples of Catholic family life and a very small support system.
Bachiochi said she believes God heals us from our wounds through our “particular vocations,” however.
Of motherhood, she said: “I think God really healed me through being faithful to teachings that I found quite hard, but truly beautiful. I was intellectually convinced by them and found them spiritually beautiful, but found them to be very, very hard to live.”
“Motherhood has served to heal me profoundly," she said, encouraging young mothers to have faith that though it might be difficult now, there is an “amazing future” awaiting them.
“It’s really an incredible gift that Church has given me … the gift of obedience,” she said.
She also said by God’s grace, she was given an “excellent husband” and has found that “just as the Church promises, that leaning into motherhood, into the little things, the daily needs, the constant requests for my attention, has truly been a school of virtue.”
The Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies Program is a new part of the Nesti Center for Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas, a recognized Catholic cultural center of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education.
Read More![‘As men, you’re called to act!’ speaker says to a packed room of young men at SEEK 2026 #Catholic
John Bishop, founder of Forge, speaks to hundreds of young men at the SEEK 2026 conference in the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, on Jan. 2, 2026. | Credit: Amira Abuzeid/CNA
Jan 6, 2026 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Hundreds of young men at the SEEK 2026 conference in the Fort Worth, Texas, Diocese this weekend filled a cavernous room to learn about what it means to be a man formed by “Jesus Christ and his Church.”John Bishop, founder and executive director of Forge, an organization that supports the family with an emphasis on masculinity, told the young men that “you are much more than your animalistic desires. Live something higher for someone higher.”In his talk titled “God Made Men,” Bishop spoke about how when Adam, the first man, “opened his eyes, he had never seen a woman before. She was completely naked.”“It was a great day for Adam,” Bishop said to waves of laughter. “Adam was the Elon Musk of the garden.”Taking a more serious tone, Bishop asked: “How would Adam see Eve? In his theology of the body, Pope John Paul II said Eve’s body was a manifestation of her soul. Eve had a perfect body, but when Adam saw her naked body, he didn’t lust over her.”“He realized who she was and who he was: made to make a gift of himself to her,” he said.Bishop then turned to what happened next: “What did Adam do as the snake came into the garden?” he asked.“Nothing! The most common, toxic, nauseating sin that runs rampant throughout men in the world is that we don’t do a damn thing.”“When we see our brothers walking into sin, we twiddle our thumbs. When we see our daughters walking out wearing next to nothing, we say nothing. When we’re grandfathers seeing the culture going in a bad way, we watch football,” he said.‘The image of God lives in a man fully alive’“You’re called to act!” Bishop admonished the group. “You might be filled with doubt … but it might be time for you to take the first step.”“The image of God lives in a man fully alive … Study after study shows that when a good man acts and doesn’t hold anything back, when he follows Christ with all [he is], … when he gives himself over [to Christ], the effect of that one man’s life multiplies beyond anything that we can understand,” he said.Hundreds of young men listen to John Bishop’s talk on masculinity on Jan. 2, 2026, at the SEEK conference in Grapevine, Texas. | Credit: Amira Abuzeid/CNAPatricio Parra, a sophomore at Texas A&M University, told CNA that he enjoyed Bishop’s talk because he and his friends have noticed how “society says it’s toxic to be masculine.”Parra said a New York Times journalist asked him and his friends after the talk why his generation of men was so invested in the faith.“There’s a striving for men to want to be men again,” he told her. “As a society, we see male role models on YouTube, but they are deformed. Recently, there aren’t a lot of good masculine models to follow.”Parra said what stood out to him the most after Bishop’s talk was the idea that Adam saw Eve’s physical beauty as the same as her internal beauty and recognized her dignity.“We have to strive to be as masculine as that,” Parra said.He said he took to heart three pieces of advice Bishop gave the men in the audience.First: “There’s no glory without the cross, no sainthood without suffering; so suffer a little bit. Make your body go through hard things,” Parra recalled. “Everything we suffer now will bring fruit for others, including our children someday, who will want to emulate us.”Next, Parra said Bishop advised that young men invest in solid, masculine friendships where they encourage one another toward sainthood.Last, Bishop told his listeners to be like St. Joseph, who, after Adam, was “one of the most manly men in Scripture.”“Joseph never said a word. We just know what he did,” Parra said. “We should do the same: just be quiet and act.”Parra demonstrated a hand motion he and his other friends from Texas A&M invented to go with the words “Zip it and act!” He made a zipper motion across his mouth and then the letter “A” with his fingers.“Don’t just talk about asking a girl out; do it!” he said enthusiastically. “Don’t just think about seminary; go do it!”](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/as-men-youre-called-to-act-speaker-says-to-a-packed-room-of-young-men-at-seek-2026-catholic-john-bishop-founder-of-forge-speaks-to-hundreds-of-young-men-at-the-seek.jpg)
