Nun’s wild prediction comes true with Lions quarterback
Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff reunited with religious sisters who taught him at Marian Catholic High School after the team’s 20–17 win over the Green Bay Packers. The Lions shared a video of Goff greeting the sisters and a postgame photo of him with them, captioned “blessed.”. For the sisters, Goff’s career is described as a prophecy fulfilled.
about 19 hours ago
Jared Goff reunited with former teachers from Marin Catholic High School after the Detroit Lions’ 20–17 win over the Green Bay Packers. The sisters’ visit drew attention because one of them, Sister Thomas Aquinas Betlewski, had predicted in 2011 that Goff would reach the NFL.
The Lions shared a video of Goff greeting the sisters and identified them as teachers who had taught him at Marin Catholic. After the game, the team posted a photo of Goff with the group, captioned “blessed.”
The sisters belong to the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. Founded in 1997 with four members, the order now has more than 140 sisters, according to the article.
Sister Miriam Holzman recalled that she and other sisters watched Goff play as a junior in 2011. Sister Thomas Aquinas, who had followed football throughout her life, watched him at quarterback and told Sister Miriam, “He’s going all the way to the NFL.”
Sister Miriam said the prediction was based not on Goff’s statistics but on how he handled the game. Sister Thomas Aquinas noted that he stayed calm under pressure, thought like a coach and showed prudence; Sister Miriam later said, “As it turns out, she was right about everything she said.”
Sister Miriam recounted the story on the Dominican Sisters Open Mic podcast. The article presents the reunion after the Lions’ win as a chance for the sisters to see Goff’s professional success firsthand and to reflect on the virtues they had noticed in him as a student-athlete.
Catholic theology of providence and human discernment
Catholic theology holds together two truths: God providentially sustains and guides creation, and human beings genuinely deliberate and choose. Providence is not a script that makes discernment pointless, nor does human freedom place a person outside God’s care. Rather, God ordinarily works through created causes—including human reason, choices, relationships, and circumstances—while guiding creation toward its proper end.
Providence is God’s wise ordering and sustaining of creation. It means more than God predicting events: God continually gives creatures their existence and sustains their capacity to act. In the Thomistic account summarized by Michal Paluch, providence is God’s ordering of things toward their end, ultimately toward divine goodness; it encompasses even contingent events and free human actions.
This does not mean that every event is good, or that God morally approves of everything that happens. The Catholic account distinguishes God’s providential governance from the misuse of freedom: sin comes from a will turned wrongly, even though God can bring good from what he does not will as sin. The older Catholic Encyclopedia expresses this by saying that God directs all things toward their final end even amid sin and evil, while identifying sin as a perversion of human liberty.
Nor is providence normally a substitute for ordinary causes. God’s action does not have to compete with the work of people or nature. In the Thomistic account, God is the first cause, while created things are real “secondary causes”: they act through their own powers, which depend on God. Thus a person’s deliberation can be genuinely theirs and, at the same time, be encompassed within God’s providence.
The apparent tension is familiar: if God guides all things, are our choices really free? John Paul II presents this as a mystery of the relationship between God’s action and human self-decision, not as a reason to deny either. He teaches that providence guides and sustains human beings while respecting the freedom God has given them.
A key distinction is between God’s universal causality and the particular way a creature acts. God does not need to make a free choice unfree in order to govern creation. The choices of rational creatures occur through reason and free will; they are not simply imposed on them as though they were physical objects moved without agency.
This is why believing in providence should not lead to fatalism. Fatalism says, in effect, “The outcome is fixed, so my choices do not matter.” Catholic theology instead says that human choices and actions matter precisely as real causes within God’s providential order. Deliberating, choosing, seeking help, and acting responsibly are not departures from providence; they are among the means through which events unfold.
Human discernment is the practical work of judging what to do. The supplied theological study identifies prudence—the virtue concerned with practical judgment—as an analogy for understanding providence. It also describes rational creatures as those who can deliberate and choose how to direct themselves toward an end.
That makes discernment neither passive waiting nor an attempt to decode a hidden message in every event. It means using the human capacities God gives: considering what is true, weighing possible courses of action, and choosing responsibly. Prayerful trust and practical judgment belong together. The Catholic Encyclopedia likewise notes that providence ordinarily works through secondary causes and does not make the efficacy of prayer or created causes unnecessary.
A helpful question, then, is not merely, “What sign is God sending me?” but also: “What is the good I am responsible to pursue? What do reason and the actual circumstances indicate? What choice can I make freely and responsibly?” The available sources support this general account of discernment as rational, free action within providence; they do not provide a detailed method for deciding every particular vocation or life choice.
Circumstances can be relevant to discernment, but an event by itself does not automatically prove that God is commanding a particular choice. Providence encompasses events, including contingent ones; the fact that something happened does not, on the evidence supplied here, establish exactly what God intends a person to do next.
This distinction matters especially when a person faces suffering, failure, or an apparent obstacle. Catholic confidence in providence does not require calling suffering good in itself or claiming to know why God permitted a specific hardship. It allows trust that God remains at work and can direct even painful events toward a greater good, without treating evil as God’s moral preference.
Similarly, a successful outcome does not by itself prove that the decision leading to it was morally right, and a difficult outcome does not by itself prove that the decision was wrong. That conclusion follows from the distinction between providential governance and the real contingency of created events: providence includes free and contingent actions, rather than erasing their particular character.
Trust in providence is therefore not a demand to control the future, but neither is it an excuse to neglect one’s responsibilities. David Fagerberg’s study of Catholic spiritual writers emphasizes trustful surrender and attention to the present moment, while also describing providence as something practiced through daily opportunities for virtue. Read alongside the Thomistic account of freedom, this points to a balance: do what is yours to do, without pretending that you control the whole course of events.
In practical terms, Catholic discernment can be understood as responsible freedom lived under providence. You are not asked to discover a secret script before acting. You are called to make a wise and morally responsible choice with the understanding, humility, and trust available to you, while recognizing that the consequences and the larger shape of events remain in God’s hands. Providence gives discernment its context; it does not eliminate the need to discern.