December 5, 2024 // Diocese

After Nearly 40 Years of Ministry in the Diocese, Lisa Everett to Retire

Joshua Schipper

Video/Digital Content/Graphic Design Producer

Throughout the past four decades, the cultural battle to uphold the sanctity of life and the family has seen significant developments. During this time, Lisa Everett, director of Marriage and Family Ministry, has guided the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in addressing these challenges. After 38 years of dedicated service at the forefront of this mission, she is stepping aside to embrace a new chapter in responding to God’s call.

Everett’s journey began when she met her husband, Deacon Fred Everett, at the University of Notre Dame. Bishop John M. D’Arcy arrived to the diocese around this time, and the Everetts first saw him at their graduation from the university. Deacon Everett pursued law school, and Lisa went on to study in Rome at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.

During this time, Deacon Everett gave Bishop D’Arcy a copy of Lisa’s resume, and the bishop hired her as a research assistant in 1986. While working as his research assistant, she also helped out in the Office of Marriage and Family Life. Then, as Deacon Everett was about to graduate, Bishop D’Arcy combined the Family Life and the Pro-life offices and asked the Everetts to serve as co-directors.

This arrangement, which allowed Everett to pursue her vocation as both catechist and mother, continued until Bishop Rhoades reorganized the diocese and put Deacon Everett in charge of the Secretariat for Evangelization and Discipleship, under which Lisa became director for Marriage and Family Ministry.

Then, as Deacon Everett looked toward retirement a few years ago, Lisa hired Associate Director Caty Burke to help out in the office.

“It’s just been a joy to work with her,” Lisa told Today’s Catholic. “And as a millennial, she brings such a freshness of perspective and her own gifts to the work that we do. I’ve said many times that anything that we have done in the office, I feel like Caty has improved by the way she sees things and the way she has her own gifts to be able to leverage for them.”

In her nearly four decades working in diocesan ministry, Everett said one of the biggest changes she has seen is the integration of Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, a series of lectures about human sexuality given by the pope from 1979 through 1984.

“I think that’s probably one of the things that, throughout the almost 40 years, was really kind of eye opening for me,” Everett said. “In some ways, I started ministry thinking, ‘Well, if we just had really great arguments, and even if we presented them in the best way possible,’ right? And if we did, we could be able to convince people of the truth of the Church’s teaching, especially on the difficult issues that our office has always been involved with – those related to sexuality. Then, I just gradually realized that we really have to touch people’s hearts first before their minds are opened, and we do that by communicating the beauty of our faith and also the goodness of God.”

Everett said she has also witnessed the growing secularization in both the Church and society at-large, which has made her mission more difficult. Despite this, some secular trends have proven fruitful when it comes to natural family planning.

“There’s a whole secular movement now [in favor of] fertility awareness-based methods that wasn’t there when I was first starting in this ministry, or starting in my own marriage for that matter, as far as good stewardship of our health and concerns about internal ecology, as well as external ecology.”

And while Everett said there were some “points of connection” that were not there before, an increase in institutional mistrust, especially mistrust of the Church, has exacerbated the challenges in her work of evangelization. Even with these growing challenges, however, Everett pointed to numerous fruits of her labor during her time with the diocese.

She highlighted the development of marriage preparation retreats as a significant achievement during her time in the office. These retreats, she explained, help the Church to meet every couple where they are and allow the Church to extend a hand of hospitality to each couple to show what the Church can offer them.

Among the many ministries that Everett has had a hand in, there is one that stands apart from the rest. Several years ago, she had recently trained to accompany parents who receive a poor prenatal diagnosis when her own granddaughter, Ava, was stillborn at full term in 2016. She described the experience as “the sword that pierced my heart as a mother and grandmother.”

“Yet, I felt in that moment that God had prepared me by giving me that bereavement training, and I knew what to do, what not to do, what to say, what not to say … and then accompanying our daughter and her husband and our whole family just dealing with Ava’s death.”

Around a year later, after some discernment, she asked Bishop Rhoades if she could start a program for families in similar situations. The bishop approved and asked that the new ministry, ava’s grace, be named in honor of Everett’s granddaughter.

“It’s often the case that God uses a place where we have experienced a wound, which when handed over to Him, that the Lord uses those wounds to eventually bless other people who share that same kind of pain. And that certainly has been the case with this.”

In her retirement, Everett will continue to serve several ministries of the diocese in a part-time role, including ava’s grace.

More recently, Everett said she and her husband have felt a call to do missionary work in Cuba two to three times each year. Everett said switching to a part-time role with the diocese in her retirement will help her realize this calling more fully.

Although excited by the new opportunities to evangelize, Everett expressed joy at the memory of working with her diocesan colleagues and local priests, saying it has “really been a wonderful thing to feel part of a team in our local Church.”

“I just feel like they’re such a blessing of our diocese, and it’s been wonderful to feel like collaborators in the vineyard with them.”

Joshua Schipper is the video/digital content/graphic design producer for the Secretariat of Communications.

of Fort Wayne-South Bend.