Mary Jane Fox
Mary Jane is the founder of the Catholic Women's Conference. She and her husband, Deacon Tom Fox, had a re-awakening of their Catholic faith in the 1980s. While on a trip through the Holy Land, they were directed by a local priest to take a silent walk along the Sea of Galilee. There, Jesus unmistakably spoke to them each.
In September 1986, Deacon Tom and Mary Jane Fox left their respective careers in hotel management and the travel industry to work full-time for St. Matthew Catholic Church. For the first seven years, their main ministry was door-to-door home visitation; in the first few years, they visited over 10,000 families.
During those seven years at St. Matthew Church – they helped establish Perpetual Adoration, faith formation ministries, produced secular radio programs “advertising” the Catholic Church & St. Matthew’s Chapel, and other outreach ministries at St. Matthew.
Tom was ordained to the permanent Diaconate in August 1988.
In 1993, they founded Pilgrim Center of Hope, an evangelization apostolate to guide people to Christ and the Church through evangelization outreach, media productions, conferences, parish missions and pilgrimages.
Tom and Mary Jane’s mission has included travel to parishes in California, Kansas, Louisiana, Mexico, and within Texas to give presentations on their ministry experiences, Parish Missions and on Door-to-Door Home Visitation Outreach. They assisted the pastor of St. Ignatius Parish in Belize City, Belize, in a parish-wide evangelization effort.
Their ministry of pilgrimages has led them to Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Turkey. Their specialty (and dearest to their hearts) is the Holy Land, having traveled there more than 63 times since 1986.
Their ministry work has been featured in five nation-wide Catholic periodicals and on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) show Living His Life Abundantly in 1995 on the video I Am the Bread of Life, produced by Stepstone Productions, Inc. In February 2008, they received the Catholic Television of San Antonio (CTSA) Leadership Award. In March 2011, they received Guadalupe Radio Network‘s Pescadores de Hombres (Fishers of Men) Award. In 2011, they were invested into the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. In November 2012, they were awarded the Living Stones Solidarity Award from the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation for their work in the Holy Land.
They reflect, "The call we received from the Lord to serve in the field of Catholic evangelization has been a most enlightening, inspirational, and challenging vocation!"
She will team up with Nan Balfour to present a special version of "A Journey with the Shroud" presentation about the Shroud of Turin, the mysterious burial cloth that puzzles modern science. What might it tell us about Jesus Christ? Nan and Mary Jane have both studied in the post-graduate certificate program on the Shroud of Turin from the Science and Faith Institute of the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum of Rome.
