Over 25 years later, John Paul II’s Letter to Artists still influencing Catholic women
In today’s internet world, it often seems people are more likely to meet on their phones than to meet in person.
Although new technology has enabled people to be more in touch with each other, rates of loneliness are reaching the highest levels in history.
This can also hurt Catholic women – and Endow is trying help them have true relationships.
Endow – which stands for Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women – creates small-group gatherings of women who read aloud, reflect on study themes, and speak honestly about living out their faith, without the pressure of weekly homework.
Their latest publication helps women study Pope St. John Paul II’s Letter to Artists, which came out in 1999.
“There seems to be an assault on beauty in our culture,” said Annette Bergeon, CEO of Endow.
“Art is getting ugly—think of urinals in museums or soulless buildings. We used to have gorgeous architecture and now so much feels chaotic and devoid of harmony,” she said.
Drawing from John Paul’s Letter to Artists, an eight-chapter study invites women to rediscover and reclaim beauty, art, and culture as doorways to God. It also offers practical ways to live out the gift of creativity through relationships, work, service, and prayer.
Staff from Endow spoke to Crux Now about their work, and why they chose John Paul’s Letter to Artists for their latest endeavor.
Crux Now: this came out over 30 years ago when I was, in my twenties. And the world has changed a lot. The art world has changed a lot. Why is a 30-year-old document a good place for women to meet?
Terri Sue Monark, Director of Content: The letter was written in 1999, just before the explosion of social media, AI, digital content creation, influencers, [ten years before Instagram launched]. It seems like he already saw this deeper crisis coming. It wasn’t a crisis of our ability to produce or create things or even about technique, but more of a crisis of meaning.
Endow’s study on Letter to Artists is so important because it’s really helping us reflect on questions like why are we creating, what is beauty and what is beauty for? Does art point beyond ourselves? And if so, what does that mean? How does it help elevate us?
John Paul II was concerned with our culture losing this shared understanding of truth, of beauty, of goodness, of a vision of a human person rooted in dignity because a lot of art that’s created now has this shock value–they’re just churning it out for clicks. There’s no meaning behind it. And so, John Paul II is reminding us that beauty is not decorative. It is essential.
Annette Bergeon, CEO: I think that John Paul II was very prophetic when he wrote it 30 years ago along with another of his letter’s [from 1995], Letter to Women, which is the document that really launched the Endow apostolate. If you read what he wrote in Letter to Women, with everything that’s happened, the confusion in our culture around what it means to be a woman and what is really a crisis of identity, it almost seems like he wrote the Letter to Women for our time today. When I read the Letter to Artists, I see the exact same thing.
John Paul II in 1999 saw that beauty was becoming unimportant in our culture, in our society and that it seems that our modern culture only values utility. Once something is not useful anymore, then it has no value, whether that’s a human person or a beautiful piece of art. John Paul II knew that art calls us to the transcendent, and that the loss of beauty and the loss of beautiful art was going to inhibit the average Catholic Christian person, the woman and man in the pew, or even the average human being, from encountering God in this way.
One of the things that he said in the document in section 10 was that the church hopes for a renewed epiphany of beauty. He was calling for the church to demand beautiful things and to bring beauty back. I don’t think we’ve seen that epiphany. I think that epiphany still needs to come and that’s one of the reasons why Endow felt it was so important to put this document into the hands of women.
You talk about the importance of this document and how women need to know this attitude towards beauty. How does Endow work? How do you do that? It sounds like that’s a great idea, but what does it look like?
Monark: You may have seen that Endow stands for Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women. We call women together, inviting women of all ages, middle school, high school, adults, to gather in small groups. They meet in homes, parishes [and online]. We invite them to engage with these great female Catholic Saints and doctors of the church and with these really important documents that they may not otherwise read. We create this on-ramp, an accessibility, to these truths of our faith. We do it in community, we do it in friendship. This happens through shared guided reading and discussion, and that’s where our study guides come in.
Each study session lasts about an hour and a half to two hours. Each chapter begins and ends in prayer. You do one chapter per session. The women take turns reading the text out loud so that they’re really proclaiming the truths of our faith aloud together. They’re inviting the Holy Spirit into the study, which walks them through the actual text and through thoughtful commentary to help them unpack what they’ve read from the Pope or a doctor of the church.
There’s discussion questions peppered throughout so that the conversation really unfolds naturally. These questions really help women connect what they’re reading to their own lives. Why does this matter for me? Why does this matter for me now?
Every group has a host. We don’t really have teachers or leaders, but there is a host or co-host who invites the women together. They gently facilitate the discussion to stay on track.
One thing unique to Endow is that it really honors their intellect. It’s text-based, discussion centered, and honors that intellect. It stretches women maybe a little bit farther than they’ve gone before. There’s no homework, there’s no prep to do beforehand. The reading happens together, which makes the church’s most important truths and teachings accessible, but it doesn’t simplify them.
Bergeon: First of all, the read aloud method is truly one of the geniuses of Endow because it creates an incarnation experience of hearing the words of Pope John Paul II or hearing the words of St. Theresa of Avila or one of the doctors of the church.
So you’re hearing it aloud in a community. You’re reading along and it asks women to contemplate the important questions of life that, in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, we don’t always have the opportunity to come together with other women and talk about the things that matter the most.
What Endow does is it presents women with philosophy and theology and asks them, how is this relevant to their lives? It asks them, how does this influence the myriad of choices that we make every single day, whether it’s how we spend our time, how we spend our money, how we raise our children, what we choose to pursue for a career.
By prompting women in community to start asking these important questions, you find the answers. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened Just by prompting women to ask these questions, Endow enlivens their faith.
Women start to find those answers to the important questions that maybe they had even forgotten to ask. They find those answers and they find their role. Very often they find their personal vocation because God has an assignment for every single one of us. Often we don’t even know what to ask God, what is it that you want me to do?
In an Endow group, that becomes part of the daily conversation. Just by asking those questions, women find their purpose. They find that role of how God wants them to help build the kingdom. It activates them in a way that’s really beautiful, transformational and has a significant impact on their families, their parishes, their communities, even their workplaces.
Monark: Endow is for every woman. It’s for that woman who may be a new Catholic, maybe she just went through OCIA. Endow is also for the Cradle Catholic, the well-formed Catholic. And what I have loved to see is a group of women come together who are in all of those stages of their faith journey, and it becomes this really rich conversation.
They’re the newer Catholics asking questions that maybe the formed Catholics haven’t thought about in a really long time, or, vice versa. The formed Catholic is bringing up some issues help the newer Catholic think a bit more deeply.
So, it’s not just for one type of Catholic, it’s for every woman.
Is it also for the “grasping Catholic”? Someone who’s born Catholic, maybe goes to church occasionally, but doesn’t know exactly what they believe. How does it help a Catholic like that?
Bergeon: I am that person so I can speak from personal experience. I’m a cradle Catholic that kind of fell away from the church before finding my Catholic faith again through Endow. I was in an Endow group for a decade before I ever joined the leadership team.
I’m someone who has experienced this for myself. The way I like to describe it is that growing up a cradle Catholic, my faith was like this treasure chest that sat on the shelf, that I would pull down on Sundays for an hour and then put back on the shelf and it was locked. And I didn’t have the key to unlock it.
I didn’t know all of the things that were inside this treasure chest that really could help me to live the life that I dreamed of, to have that fulfilling, fruitful, joyful, not without suffering, meaningful life. What Endow did for me was to give me the key to unlock this treasure box.
That was my faith. I always knew the what’s of the Catholic faith, the shoulds that we were supposed to do, but I never knew the whys. And Endow gave me the whys. There’s a lot of things about our faith and about our life as Catholics that are difficult to ascent to.
It takes work and effort to ascend, but if you don’t understand the whys, you don’t have a chance. Being able to access the whys behind some of the more difficult teachings of our faith were just transformational for me. It made me understand the beauty of a life lived in communion with Christ, the beauty and the the power of an interior life that I never had before as a cradle Catholic who was just going through the motions.
So from that standpoint, I say the answer to your question is resounding yes. Any woman, whether she’s new to the faith, whether she’s a well-formed Catholic or if she like me, is someone who was raised Catholic but never really understood the depth and the beauty of the intellectual tradition of our church. Yes, Endow is for every woman.
Monark: That’s because we’re going right to the source. The women are hearing directly from the Church, from the popes. The culture is telling women one thing about what the Catholic Church is, especially in regards what the church thinks about women?
Women have been getting misinformation for a very long time about what the Church says about women. Our documents, our studies go right to the source. You’re reading JPII’s, you’re reading Pope Benedict’s words, and you’re making sense of it. When women hear the truth, they recognize it and it resonates deeply.
Going back to my original question, about how does it work? I’m not a woman, so I’m going to have to pretend a little bit here, pretend I’m a woman who’s going to church. Maybe I’m divorced. Maybe I am single. Maybe I’m in a happy marriage but I want to have that community. In a lot of churches, there isn’t a lot of community. They’ve heard about Endow. How does it work? They think Endow is a great idea. What do they do?
Monark: There are two practical ways to get started, both involve contacting us first at endowgroups.org. Women can become hosts themselves or join an existing group. For hosting, they’d put the word out at their parish or among their friends that they’d like to meet in their home or in the parish hall or wherever. At Endow, we also map existing groups that are open to new participants so we can move women into those groups.
Bergeon: We have a lot of resources on our website, endowgroups.org, to lead women through how to start their own groups or join a group. We have host training manuals and directions. We also offer one-on-one host mentorship for women who are interested in Endow but need more information to get started.
On our website, women can also sign up to connect with Endow women in their area. Oftentimes we have more women interested in Endow than we have hosts available. We help connect a group of women in a community with each other and encourage them to get together to meet. Often, one of the women will raise her hand and say, I think I would like to host this. That’s really the linchpin to getting started in an Endow group.
We have a very small team in Denver of six women who are basically run this international apostolate. So, there’s no possible way we can feed all these groups. Our goal is to identify those women who have the gift of hospitality more so than intellectual or educational background to open up their homes or to invite women from their parish to gather.
The Endow study is the authority and the teacher. No one in the group has to have any special education, background or training. Just an open heart and a desire to learn, a desire to invite other women into that process. If there isn’t an Endow group in their area, our goal is to connect the interested women with each other and encourage them to start a group.
Monark: We stress that in our host mentorship calls and communications with interested women that you don’t have to be a teacher, you don’t have to be a leader, you don’t have to be a theologian. I think when they hear that it really takes a lot of pressure off. They breathe easier and they’re like, okay, then maybe I can do this.
I think they are intimidated at first, and so that’s part of our job to help them understand that the actual study is the authority. That’s the teacher, and you’re all coming together on the same plane to work through this together. Your collective intelligence will help you through this study.
Bergeon: All of our studies, and there are 31 to date in English and Spanish, carry an imprimatur from the Archdiocese of Denver. Our studies are reviewed by a censor and approved by the Archdiocese before they’re published. So when we say the study is the authority, women can be confident this is not the voice of Endow.
This is the voice of the Magisterium and has been fully reviewed by the Archdiocese of Denver. The imprimatur says there’s nothing contrary to the teachings of our Catholic faith in the studies. Women can rely on that and rely on the authority of the study–what they’re reading and learning and discussing is truly the teachings of our church,
Endow has been around for 23 years. The world was a much more different place than we’d like to think. Sometimes I’ll sit down at a coffee bar and everyone’s on their phones and even making “virtual friends.” How does this affect the way women can meet and connect, especially Catholic women?
Monark: That’s such a relevant question. Even with families having dinner at a restaurant, everyone is on their phone. It’s crazy and it’s sad.
All that said, obviously social media and online interaction does have benefits. It’s allowed Catholic women to find each other. It’s amplified some really amazing, Catholic faithful voices. It’s created visibility for Catholic thought. It’s also created a performance persona, a highly curated presence, which is not real. Women are searching for authentic connection, they’re hungry for that. There’s no substitute for real community. And when women are in a real community, they feel that and realize how much they need it. While we’ve been more visible to one another online, we’ve also become less known authentically. Women are really searching for meaning beyond the surface, real friendship. and obviously solid formation, not just the Catholic, fly by night, Instagram post.
Endow fills that void. We encourage women to meet in person, face to face, to put the phones away, to have real discussions, to have real struggles, to ask questions, to be vulnerable with one another because that’s where real true relationships and friendships are born.
No one is this perfect image. Nobody can live up to that yet we see all these people trying. After that initial connection or spark they see online, Endow is that next step that goes deeper.
Bergeon: There is an epidemic of loneliness in this country. We see evidence of it all the time, especially among young women who are the most engaged with social media and have the most friends. I think my daughter has 3000 followers on Instagram through no effort on her own. But many of these women are isolated, lonely, some even depressed. There is a recognition that the artificial connectedness that we feel from social media is exactly that, artificial.
Women that overcome inertia and leave their home, or if they are hosting, clean their house. Once women deal with the messiness of traffic and getting to a place at a certain time. Once you get over that hurdle, you can get a taste of authentic experience, and even just once or twice, then women begin to crave it because they realize that there is something different about authentic, face-to-face community versus the sterile distance of social media connections, which can provide us with instant gratification which dissipates quickly. Then we need the next hit and the next hit. Even just a few group Endow meetings will create the desire and hunger in the women to get together on a regular basis. If we can get them over that initial inertia and have them the taste the beauty of real authentic face-to-face community, they’re sold.
Right now, in, at least in the anglophone world, Catholic life is so centered on the parish and parish activities. Come to the parish. Come to the parish, we’ve got this, we’re going to have a cake sale, come to the parish, give us money, please. How important do you think it is for Catholic women to have these kinds of encounters? Not just with Endow, but also maybe going to have a dinner together and things like that. How important is it for them to have that happening when outside the parish?
Bergeon: Endow from its beginning has not connected itself with the parish. And one of the reasons for that is there are different types of parishes. Some are vibrant and nurturing and that naturally build community, but unfortunately, I feel like those are less common than parishes where people are going to Mass maybe once a week, maybe not at all, and outside of that, there really isn’t as much nurturing and connection as you would hope.
Endow has always encouraged women to look for community where they and where they can find it. If that’s the parish, great. And we have a lot of really amazing Endow groups in parishes. That’s not always possible. So then we encourage women to look in their community, in their neighborhood. Maybe they don’t live in a Catholic area, or maybe they’re working in a secular profession, so they don’t have other Catholic friends. Then we encourage them to look at other circles, like the parents of their children’s friends, especially when their children are in a Catholic school or in a Catholic community. If they really don’t have any community, then we try to connect them with other like-minded Catholic women.
The point is to find your community of women. There are lots of places to look and not every woman is going to have the same opportunity. While we work with parishes, pastors and communities that are supportive of what we’re doing, we don’t find that universally. Then we encourage women to find their community wherever they can.
We’re about to mark the one year anniversary of the election of Pope Leo. Has the election of an American Pope affected what you do in any way? Has it been more exciting for you? Has it caused more interest in being Catholic and being a Catholic woman? Has there been any kind of influence at all with Pope Leo coming to office?
Bergeon: Absolutely. I think there’s been a dramatic influence. One of the things I can point to is the resurgence of interest in faith, spirituality, and particularly Catholicism in our country. Young people who for many decades have made science their God—if it can’t be proven scientifically, it doesn’t exist–we’re seeing a dramatic shift and an interest again in spirituality, in prayer, in cultivating an interior life. In Catholicism, the election of an American Pope has really heightened that trend, which was already beginning.
We see it here in our work at Endow. Our sales are up 40 percent year over year when we compare January through February 26 to last year, which was prior to the election of Pope Leo. We’ve seen a huge increase in interest in Endow, traffic to our website, in women signing up to join Endow groups and downloading our host materials.
You can also download a free copy of chapter one of any of our studies. If you’re interested in letter to artists and want to see what the Endow method is all about, you can go to our website and download a free copy of the first chapter of this or any of our studies. We also have studies for young adults in middle and high school. We have studies for the Hispanic community and a new study for young women preparing for their Quinceanera. It’s a perfect time to help young women understand the beauty of their feminine dignity, their feminine vocation at a time in their life when they’re really stepping into the role of becoming a woman. We have resources for women of all ages, and we’re seeing a lot of increased interest in all the things Endow provides.
Are there any examples perhaps that come to mind, how you’ve seen studies affect a woman in particular, or a group?
Bergeon: I shared a little bit about my personal experience, and how dramatically it changed me as, a wife, as a mother, as a friend. One of my favorite testimonials, it comes from a young woman who went through our Quineanera program and she said, after this program, I no longer consider myself an atheist.
So to imagine a young woman coming into an Endow group, considering herself an atheist, participating for eight to 10 weeks with a group of girls her age, studying her faith, her dignity through the lens of this upcoming celebration life, a rite of passage moment. And then to come out the other side and say, I’m not an atheist. I believe in God.
We see that on so many levels in the lives of women who have heard through an Endow group that they have a vital, irreplaceable role to play in their church. The church needs women and our contributions in every aspect of parish life, family life, and in society.
Women encounter this truth and they realize the Church needs them and the vital role they play. Then they want to figure out what that role is. It really activates them into their mission. Endow is almost creating an army of warriors for the church by helping women understand the beauty of their feminine genius and how important they are to the success of our Church.
Monark: I spoke with a mother of girls who had been doing Endow for herself for quite some time. I asked her if she could share a few words about her experience, and she said, simply, I’m a better mother, I’m a better wife because of Endow. And this particular woman wanted her daughters to get the same message so she was starting a group for her high school age daughters and their friends because she felt before they head off to college, she wanted them to know the truth about their innate dignity. That they’re beloved daughters of God, that no one can take that dignity away from them. Our young people are being taught that it’s how many likes you get on Instagram, how many followers you have, and she wanted those young women to hear the truth.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome