Slideshow: Women’s Campout

This past weekend, Resident Assistant Sarah Dufresne (’14), joined by tutors Carol Day and Karen Zedlick, led a group of Thomas Aquinas College women on a camping trip to the KOA campgrounds in Santa Paula.

The excursion began Friday afternoon after classes. When the campers reached the site, they set up and explored the area before preparing dinner. Afterward they engaged in a brief discussion of Pope St. John Paul II’s “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women,” followed by music and s’mores around the campfire. The next morning College Chaplain Rev. Paul Raftery, O.P., visited the campground to offer Mass, after which the ladies enjoyed a pancake breakfast before returning to campus.

“It was a brief retreat in which we focused on the dignity and vocation of women and reflected on the meaning of femininity as understood through the eyes of St. John Paul II,” says Miss Dufresne. “It also gave the girls a chance to enjoy the beauty of California’s oak trees, mountains, and small streams, and allowed them to encounter each other as friends and as sisters.”