“It’s Just Jesus!”: Why this young latina stays Catholic and works for justice | S3E4

Ana Ruiz is a young immigrant from Mexico who has spent most of her life directly or indirectly serving in ministry. Her earliest memory is at a retreat center where her parents served as marriage encounter leaders. Fast forward to today, she has recently graduated from Georgetown University where she majored in culture and politics and minored in theology and german and was the vice president of Catholic Women at Georgetown, a campus court of the Catholic Daughters of the Americas. She has interned at multiple well-known Catholic organizations such as the Catholic Labor Network and the USCCB, has helped organize the annual catholic social ministry gathering, and participated in a virtual synodal session with Pope Francis last February 2022.

In our discussion, we talked about all these personal and professional experiences, but we also talk about why she stays Catholic and works for justice despite coming into adulthood during one of the most difficult periods of history for everyone, but in particular Catholics, She has a very powerful, yet simple answer: It’s all about Jesus.

Excerpt:

"Jesus' mission was not only to transform our hearts and minds but transform the world and transform those who are kind of stuck under these structures of sin that we are all responsible for. [...] It’s something Jesus did. The call to our faith is to model Jesus and so we have to model him in that way."

Word of the day: two feet of love in action

Related Episode:

• What immigrants give up in order to fit in, the importance of names, and anti-racism with Alex Quezada | S3E2
• A Theology of the Good Samaritan with Yohan Garcia from the USCCB | S2 E5

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