Evvere Anthony
Episode 94
16 NOV 2020
Originally from Antigua, and now living in Arizona, as a young child her dream was to be a Catholic nun. She is a Benedictine Oblate and has also made her Cursillo weekend. She also served in the U.S. military for 12 years. The list of sports she has competed in is quite lengthy, and she even won a Presidential Award for Athletics. Nowadays she is a coach with the North Phoenix Christian Soccer Club and also hopes to one day compete in wheelchair basketball as part of the Paralympics.
Notable guest quotes:
“My home was right next to the Catholic school… so my mother enrolled me over there. And, as I entered the rooms where the nuns were, I saw a picture of Jesus on the cross, which I had never seen before… and I just wanted to know more about Jesus after that.”
“I was lucky enough to grasp the Bible so that I could teach Sunday school to the little ones.”
“I went to Rome… and I prayed with the Pope, John Paul II, and even though I was kind of going to church I wasn’t in the church like I was before, and he said ‘Catholics come home’ … so I decided I needed to get back involved more fully than just going.”
“I went to the Mass and that’s when I met Monsignor O’Grady … he invited me to come back the next Sunday, and I never stopped going… I was able to become Minister of the Word there… I became an Assistant Sacristan. I was also a Eucharistic Minister.”
“They needed a Catholic chaplain assistant to join up with the different groups that were there… Your premise is, for the Catholic faith, you’re going to fill in as a Minister of the Word because there’s not a priest there every Sunday, so we still tried to have something. So, every Sunday in Iraq we would have Minister of the Word.”
“I was lucky enough where I started talking to the aviators that we need to schedule the priest to come every week and not every month.”
“The Ugandan guards were so amazed because they knew me as the lady that does the ministry, who’s a soldier who does Ministry of the Word in the Catholic church, and from that point on they were like, ‘You’re a nun with a gun’!”
“I get to work with young men and women, mostly the female team that I have… and we’re able to assist them with the Christian faith.”
“The Lord is foremost in what we’re doing in terms of training because we don’t want them to have an attitude of, ‘I’m winning, I’m playing to win and I don’t care about anything else.’ Teaching them that if you put the Lord first, everything else will fall into place.”
“People think you have to win all the time, it’s all about winning. There’s lessons to be learned in losing.”
“Your faith is… a team sport in the sense that we’re all trying to get to heaven but we’re all going in a different direction, but we’re working together. That’s the church, the bride of Christ. So if we’re working together we should be respecting each other whether we’re on the field or whether we’re in our normal lives.”
