When Women Are Told They Are a Gift: Catholic Leadership Formation and the Psychology of Vocation

The 2026 GIVEN Catholic Young Women's Leadership Forum, running June 24 through 28 and hosted by the GIVEN Institute, has gathered Catholic women between the ages of 21 and 35 for five days of keynote addresses, leadership training, mentorship, adoration, prayer, and Mass in Washington, D.C. The forum's organizing conviction is stated plainly by Jennifer Cole-Schaefer, GIVEN's executive director, in remarks to EWTN News: "We hope women will take away an understanding, on a much deeper level, that they are a gift. They are a beloved daughter of God."

The claim that a person is a gift — not merely that a person has gifts — is a philosophical and theological assertion with real consequences for how formation, mentorship, and psychological wellbeing intersect. It situates identity before function, being before doing, and belonging before achievement.

This is not a motivational posture. It is, in the language of the Catholic Christian understanding of the human person, an anthropological claim — one with roots in the imago Dei and elaborated in the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, which understands human beings as created, fallen, and redeemed, with dignity that precedes and grounds any assessment of performance.[^1]

The architecture of belonging before achievement

Martin Seligman's work on meaning and engagement, and Carol Dweck's research on identity and growth, converge on a consistent finding: people flourish when they understand themselves as inherently valuable prior to any assessment of their performance.[^3] The Catholic tradition frames this not as a therapeutic technique but as a revealed truth — one grounded in the doctrine of the imago Dei and elaborated across centuries of theological anthropology.

What GIVEN constructs at this forum is an environment in which that truth is not merely stated but inhabited. Cole-Schaefer describes a process that begins before the forum itself, deepens during the five-day gathering, and then extends across a full year of mentored accompaniment. "The formation starts well before we get to the forum, but the forum is a really pivotal in-person experience," she told EWTN News. "It's after the forum that the real work begins — when women start to actualize their action plans, and they don't do that alone."

The phrase "they don't do that alone" is where the spiritual and psychological registers meet most directly. GIVEN pairs each participant with a trained mentor for the year following the forum — "a whole army of women with some life experience who've stepped forward and been trained as mentors to walk with our young women as they discern all the steps," in Cole-Schaefer's words. Mentors in this model are not simply more experienced peers offering advice. They are prepared guides whose formation equips them to hold space for discernment and to support the kind of identity integration that the forum initiates.

Giftedness as vocation, not inventory

It would be a mistake to reduce GIVEN's framework to a strengths-inventory exercise. Cole-Schaefer locates the question of gifts within a relational and vocational context: "They've been given gifts that are specific to them, and God has a plan to use those gifts. It's all about receiving this idea that we are a gift, realizing what our gifts are, and responding in a way that only we can respond with our particular gifts."

The sequence — receiving, realizing, responding — maps onto a logic of integration rather than mere activation. The woman who leaves this forum is not simply someone who has identified her skill set. She has been invited into a narrative about her life that is larger than her own ambitions and more demanding than any career trajectory. That narrative is vocational in the classical sense: a calling, not a project.

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person frames this calling as one dimension of a broader anthropology of flourishing. Human persons are called to perfection and holiness through the interpersonal accepting and giving of love, and this calling encompasses integrity at the psychological, moral, and spiritual levels, as well as integrity in relationships with God and neighbor — including relationships specific to one's vocational state in life.[^4]

This distinction matters psychologically because research on meaning and wellbeing consistently distinguishes between hedonic happiness — pleasure-seeking and satisfaction-oriented — and eudaimonic flourishing, which involves engagement with something beyond the self. Vocation, as the Catholic tradition understands it, is structurally eudaimonic. It orients the person outward toward service, toward community, toward what Cole-Schaefer describes as changing "the world in whatever way God is calling them to."

The action plans participants develop are personalized, community-rooted, and Church-directed. Each plan is designed to serve both the local community and the broader Church, and each is carried forward through relational accountability. This is formation that takes seriously the gap between inspiration and implementation.

Sex difference, complementarity, and the GIVEN model

The GIVEN Institute's focus on young Catholic women is not merely demographic targeting. It reflects the conviction, articulated within the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, that men and women are biologically, psychologically, and spiritually distinct — and that these differences shape how each sex flourishes, exercises the virtues, and responds to formation.[^2] The forum does not flatten these differences into a generic leadership curriculum. It takes seriously what Vitz, Nordling, and Titus describe as the complementary genius of the feminine, including the particular way women tend to express courage through suffering-with rather than solely through direct confrontation — a mode of strength that is consonant with the accompaniment and mentorship architecture GIVEN employs.[^2]

This is formation that draws on the nuptial significance of sexual difference without reducing women to a single role. The action plans participants develop span professional, ecclesial, and community life. The forum's emphasis on the woman as gift — rather than as a category of worker to be trained — presupposes that what she brings is irreducibly her own, shaped by her particular nature and calling.

Formation that scales without diluting

One structural challenge facing any formation initiative is the tension between depth and reach. Programs that go deep tend to be small; programs that scale tend to become thin. GIVEN's design addresses this tension with care. The forum is an intensive, bounded, in-person experience that creates conditions for genuine encounter. The year of mentored accompaniment that follows extends that intensity into ordinary life without requiring participants to remain in a retreat-like environment.

The result is a model scalable not by lowering the bar of formation but by distributing the relational infrastructure that sustains it. Every trained mentor extends the program's reach without diluting its depth. Every action plan implemented in a local community multiplies the forum's impact without centralizing it.

This is, in organizational terms, a model of distributed leadership that is theologically coherent. The Church has always understood herself as a body in which each member's particular gifts serve the whole. GIVEN gives that ecclesiology an operational form.

Young Catholic women are not a constituency to be served or a demographic to be retained. They are, as the forum's central conviction insists, gifts — to the Church, to their communities, to a world that needs what they carry. When a young woman leaves Washington with a clearer sense of who she is and a concrete plan for how to serve, supported by a trained mentor who will walk with her through the year ahead, she carries something that neither catechesis alone nor any self-help curriculum alone could fully provide. The integration of theological anthropology and structured accompaniment is where that formation becomes possible.

Source: EWTN News, "Catholic women's leadership forum tells young women: 'You are a gift,'" June 26, 2026.

References

[^1]: Paul C. Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), premise-level account of created dignity and the imago Dei.

[^2]: Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), ch. 9: "Man and Woman: Equality, Differences, and Complementarity," complementary genius of the feminine; women tend more to suffer with.

[^3]: Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), ch. 4: the Catholic Christian representation of the person has always given the traditional virtues importance in understanding personality, with natural virtues such as justice, courage, wisdom, and temperance integrated into contemporary psychological frameworks; see also Martin Seligman on meaning and engagement and Carol Dweck on identity and growth, converging on the finding that people flourish when they understand themselves as inherently valuable prior to any assessment of their performance.

[^4]: Titus, C. S., Nordling, W. J., and Vitz, P. C., "Fulfilled through Vocation," in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), pp. 210-248: human persons are called to flourishing through the interpersonal accepting and giving of love, encompassing integrity at the psychological, moral, and spiritual levels.