These comments were shared on June 1st during the 133rd Graduation of the Class of 2017-2018 at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans, LA.

Good evening! Welcome to the Board of Trustees, parents, friends and family and, especially to the Senior class of 2018.

This evening, we celebrate a culminating event in your graduation from The Academy of the Sacred Heart, but, more significantly, we celebrate the circuitous journey of each one of you to this solemn moment.

None of you have arrived here by accident. Your sitting here has not occurred by some random phenomena, but by intricate design and by a miraculous implicate power at work in your life.

I look at you this evening as graduates of the Rosary knowing that God has placed within each of you the future, and in your hearts, God is giving birth to the future. This future is not simply for yourselves, but, also, for the world.

In you, I see women of faith and grace, women with voice, women of conviction, women who are champions, and women of intellect.

All of these gifts are given to you for a truly deep purpose, and, this I am very certain about. This divine purpose is burning within each of you now like a fire, even though you may not exactly be aware of it or know toward what that fire of passion will do for the world.

Don’t worry about that…. just stoke it with love, nourish it with prayer and the Holy Spirit will do the rest.

This truth, I stand on as surely as I am standing behind this podium, and I promise that this grace is given to you as pure love.

With these diplomas this evening, we affirm you as women of Jesus’ Sacred Heart, and I, with the Religious of the Heart, along with your parents, and all of your teachers cannot wait to see how you change the world!

My prayer for you is our theme for the year that “God strengthen in you, the work He has begun in you!”

God bless you on your journey!