Courtney McGrailMeabh Carlin and Hannah McCauley, the Goretti Girls, tell Casey Schmauder how they spread the message of Christ one song at a time
Casey Schmauder
When Meabh Carlin and Hannah McCauley met in their final year of college, they never could have anticipated their friendship leading them to present an album – their own – to the Holy Father in Rome.
Yet the Goretti Girls had that privilege last February.
Both musical women – Meabh grew up singing with her sisters and Hannah learned to play a variety of traditional instruments – began taking their Faith seriously around the time they reached adulthood. Hannah, from Bellaghy, Co. Derry, had a “powerful conversion” while saying the rosary at a prayer meeting in college, to which she’d been invited by Meabh – and that was how the two met.
Meabh’s faith journey had taken off a few years earlier, in 2011, when the Lurgan, Co. Armagh girl was in Madrid. “I had my conversation when I was on pilgrimage at World Youth Day in Madrid,” says Meabh. “I was hit by a car and had a near-death experience that brought me into my faith, and the journey of faith has been on for five years now.”
Harmony
The two friends began playing together, but they realised their music wasn’t as good as it should be, given their musical talents. They found their true harmony once they dedicated their music to God.
“The difference for both of us was that, although we both have musical backgrounds, we actually never used our gifts for God,” says Meabh. “When we started to do that, that’s when something special really started to happen for both of us. It became so life-giving for us and we were able to really see the visible fruit.”
They both feel that not they but the Lord uses their music to touch hearts.
The two women moved in together after college and started holding a holy hour in their area, where crowds would drive to see the women sing and play in worship. They appreciated their friends and community who shared in their worship, and if it weren’t for community members’ suggestions, Meabh and Hannah may never have thought to make an album.
“It wasn’t our idea at all. We were just sharing our music at holy hour and after the [crowds] would just share with us how the music had touched them and their hearts,” Meabh said. “It was actually the local people that suggested that we record an album.”
They knew it was God’s plan when they received an anonymous donation with exactly enough money to produce the album.
They both had a prayerful devotion to St Maria Goretti, so they easily decided to be the Goretti Girls, feeling that God had led them to Maria Goretti through a series of intersections between their lives and the patron saint.
“On a visit to Nashville that Hannah and I made last September, we ended up staying with a group of girls who had Maria Goretti as their patron. We didn’t really know a whole lot about Maria Goretti but she kept popping up for us and we started praying to her,” says Meabh. “Within a few weeks a sister in Rome contacted us to tell us she had a first class relic of Maria Goretti that she wanted to give to someone who had devotion to her. She was unaware that we had been praying to Maria Goretti, so that was confirmation to us that she was to be our patron for our ministry.”
In February this past year, the women travelled to Rome to both receive the relic and meet the Holy Father.
Now aged 24, in their ministry the women play together, speak at schools about the Eucharist, and lead parish talks and parish missions, focusing on Eucharistic adoration.
In a year and a half playing together, the young women have written about 40 songs, each, surprisingly, in a matter of minutes. Meabh describes how the girls would be in Kenna or in the Sea of Gallilee and a song would instantly press upon both of their hearts simultaneously.
Lyrics
“Hannah and I will both just be in a place and she’ll start playing and I’ll start writing the lyrics and within minutes we have a song,” says Meabh. “It’s just like we both get the inspiration at the same time and the Holy Spirit just inspires us both in sync.”
Meabh confesses that, in months without any inspiration, Hannah and she would try to force a song to come together, without either of the women feeling the Spirit. Yet, those songs felt false, and they never lasted. Now they wait and listen to God, even though His timing is not their own. They may go months without inspiration, and then they may be led to write 10 songs in a single week.
With their music, the young women feel specifically called to minister to youth not unlike Meabh herself who was raised Catholic, but who felt distant from the Church until she had her moment of conversion in Madrid. They long to help young people of faith reconnect with their Lord.
“It’s really about bringing people before Jesus and the Eucharist and not introducing them because they’ve been introduced through baptism. But it’s almost like reintroducing them because it is through Eucharistic adoration that Hannah and I have come to be where we are on our own journey of faith,” says Meabh.
The official release of their first album I Will Wait occurred on June 3. The women celebrated and sang for nearly 500 people, and Armagh’s Archbishop Eamon Martin spoke and sang alongside the women, with Hannah playing guitar and Meabh harmonising with him.
“It’s funny, he definitely stole the show! He was amazing and it was just a huge gift for me and Hannah both,” says Meabh. “It was such a huge honour to stand with the primate of our country, it was just a really beautiful moment that we’ll never forget.”
They have not set any plans in place for their future because they want to live in the present so they are open and waiting for the Lord to speak to them and lead them where he calls. They trust that he will fulfill the desire he’s placed in their hearts to worship with others with their music.
Though the album contains music for people at different places in their faith journeys and for different moods you may experience when you need to reach out to God, Hannah and Meabh turn to their mutual favourite track for worship.
“It’s called ‘My Lord And My God’ and it’s about the journey of faith for most of us and the struggles that comes with it,” says Meabh. “But then we come to the ultimate realisation that nothing makes sense if Jesus isn’t at the centre of it because it’s such a hard life, and at least we’re living for something more than what the world has to offer us.”
Realisation
Though their faith walks started relatively recently, the Goretti Girls realise that God doesn’t fault them for turning to him a little later in life. Because of this realisation, they’ve named the album after the title track I Will Wait, a song sung from the Lord’s perspective in which he tells His children that he waits faithfully as we take our time to come to him.
“It’s just that idea that there’s an open invitation from Jesus and the Blessed Sacrament. Although he is silent and sometimes invisible to the world, he will always wait for every soul, any soul, to come to him with an open heart and to just ask for his grace,” says Meabh. “It’s his perpetual message to us that he will always wait because he is so faithful and he’s still available and still desires to give us grace.”
You can find their music and album by contacting the Goretti Girls on Facebook or by reaching them at gorettigirls@hotmail.com.
