Report on Recent Activities of Priests for Life
August
30, 2011
The following update provides a glimpse into some of
the activities carried out by Priests for Life during the summer of 2011.
This particular report highlights many of the activities of the National
Director, Fr. Frank Pavone; there are additional reports that cover the work
done by the Pastoral Team, including Dr. Alveda King, Marie Smith, Dr.
Theresa and Kevin Burke, Janet Morana, Bryan Kemper, Fr. Victor Salomon, Fr.
Denis Wilde, OSA, Fr. Scott Daniels, OP, and others who work with the twelve
ministries that comprise the Priests for Life/Gospel of Life Family.
1. National
Clergy Training
Priests for Life continues to build innovative methods
of reaching and communicating with the clergy. Working with the other
priests on the team, Fr. Frank Pavone has developed a database of thousands
of the nation’s most active and interested pro-life priests, and
communicates with them through conventional means (such as regular phone
calls made by the priests on the Priests for Life team) as well as through
regularly scheduled webcasts. The project of providing homily hints for
preaching the pro-life message from the readings of each Sunday for all
three years of the liturgical cycle continues to be presented to priests by
means of internet, email, and smart phone applications.
Fr. Frank continues to produce You Tube videos each
week which provide the priests with commentary on the Sunday readings, as
well as with a review of the elements of the booklet “Addressing Abortion
with Confidence” which address common concerns the clergy have regarding
addressing pro-life issues.
2. Rachel’s
Vineyard Update
Rachel’s Vineyard, the world’s largest ministry of
healing after abortion, operates under the umbrella of Priests for Life, and
its founders and directors, Dr. Theresa and Kevin Burke, are full time
employees of Priests for Life.
Approximately a thousand retreats are held each year
worldwide, many of them with the sponsorship of the local diocese. These
retreats operate under two models: the Catholic retreat and the
interdenominational retreat.
To preserve the integrity of Catholic doctrine and
liturgical practice, and to preserve both therapeutic and legal integrity as
well as consistency in the use of the name “Rachel’s Vineyard,” these
retreats are conducted according to the guidelines laid out in the Retreat
Manual.
In 2011, Cardinal Justin Rigali provided the Imprimatur
for the newly-revised Catholic Manual. Fr. Frank Pavone (Pastoral Director)
and Dr. Theresa and Kevin Burke have guided the process of the revision of
this manual, and in recent months have guided the process of providing the
retreat leaders with their copy of the new manual and with detailed training
in the changes that have been made in the new manual. These changes were
explained at the bi-annual leadership conference, held in Malvern, PA in
July of 2011, and continue to be explained via conference calls held in
August and September.
The Leadership Conference held from July 17-21, 2011
was attended at full capacity with some 250 Rachel’s Vineyard leaders from
around the world. Bishop David Choby, Bishop of Nashville, was in attendance
for the whole conference and offered one of the Conference masses. Workshops
were presented by Theresa and Kevin Burke, Fr. Frank Pavone, and other
experts. Fr. Pavone also had a special meeting of the psychiatrists and
psychologists present at the conference, to establish a special advisory
board to continue to give professional measurement to the impact of the
Rachel’s Vineyard model and to also be available to respond to questions
both privately and publicly regarding the reality of post-abortion trauma.
Meanwhile, we are currently putting together additional
material that summarizes some of the key points about Rachel’s Vineyard that
are critical to understand, and dispels some of the common myths.
3. Silent No
More Awareness Campaign
The Silent No More Awareness Campaign is not a separate
organization, but rather a major, worldwide project of Priests for Life and
Anglicans for Life. It was co-founded in 2003 by Janet Morana (Executive
Director of Priests for Life) and Georgette Forney (President of Anglicans
for Life). This Campaign is the world’s largest mobilization of men and
women who have lost children to abortion, have found healing, and who share
their testimony.
The Campaign focuses on extending the invitation to
healing after abortion, educating the public on the harmful effects of
abortion, and giving voice to those who share their abortion stories. The
Campaign carries out its work through the assistance of Regional
Coordinators. There is an extensive manual for these coordinators, and the
co-founders of the campaign, along with Fr. Frank Pavone (Pastoral
Director), have recently revised the manual and issued the revised version
to the Regional Coordinators. Through training sessions, in person and via
conference calls, have assisted these coordinators to understand and
implement the changes.
Moreover, the Campaign has launched in the past year
the practice of “Partnering.” Churches, organizations, and pregnancy centers
who “partner” with the Campaign commit themselves to spreading the
invitation of healing, helping post-abortion clients discern properly the
call to share testimony, and utilizing the testimonies of those who have
already provided them, including offering opportunities for such individuals
to speak at events, in Churches, in legislative assemblies, and in the
media. The Campaign strictly enforces professionally crafted guidelines for
the discernment and protection of those who feel called to share their
testimony.
To foster the Partnering model, Fr. Frank has utilized
the relationships he has built over the past two decades with the national
networks of Pregnancy Centers, and over the past year has presented the
Partnering concept at the national conventions of both Heartbeat
International and Care Net, and is utilizing webcasts to supplement those
presentations. Many of the centers which have post-abortion counseling, as
well as other post-abortion healing programs, not only offer the opportunity
for clients to provide public testimony, but also offer the opportunity to
“register their regret” anonymously, that is, to
offer their permission, through the
IRegretMyAbortion.com website, to be counted as one who regrets her
abortion. This provides an informal but powerful way for the Campaign and
its partners to measure the extent of post-abortion grief.
4. Training
and Networking National Leaders
Through the personal trust he and Priests for Life have
built up in the past two decades, Fr. Frank Pavone plays a key role in
providing national pro-life leaders opportunities to network with each other
and receive ongoing education and spiritual strength.
a) The Pro-life Leadership Coalition – Priests for Life has
built the “Pro-life Leadership Coalition,” which has held annual meetings
the past two years at Ave Maria University in Florida. Gathering
approximately 40 national pro-life leaders, this coalition utilizes the
format of an all-day meeting of such leaders. The meeting is prepared for by
having the leaders fill out a specialized survey that gathers their
assessment of the key current challenges and opportunities of the movement.
The results of the survey are distributed to the members for study prior to
the meeting itself, so that when the meeting starts, there is already a high
level of awareness of the thinking of those in the room. The meeting then
proceeds with a structured discussion among the members. There are no
speakers or presentations, but rather an effort to discern what steps can be
taken by all the groups together. These meetings have led to unanimous
consensus for action among the groups. The first meeting focused on the need
to activate the African-American community on abortion, and led to the
commissioning of surveys and focus groups which were then distributed to and
discussed among the member groups. The key point of consensus on which the
second meeting focused was the utilization of post-abortion testimony by all
the groups, and joint action will occur on this during the latter part of
2011.
b) Retreats for Pro-life Leaders – Priests for Life conducts
retreats for national leaders in the pro-life movement. At the gracious
invitation of Judge William Clark (former National Security Advisor of the
United States), these retreats are held at his ranch in California
approximately twice a year, and have, for over a decade, provided leaders
with the opportunity to get to know each other better and to seek the Lord
together, so as to avoid misunderstandings and unnecessary divisions.
Various concrete, join programs of action have sprung up as a result,
despite the fact that the retreats are centered on prayer and fellowship
rather than on business and strategy sessions. Preparations have been
underway for two such retreats in 2012.
c) National Pro-life Religious Council – Fr. Frank serves as
President of the National Pro-life Religious Council, which is the
interdenominational umbrella group in the United States that networks
leaders of Protestant and Evangelical churches in the cause of life. Some of
the leaders organize efforts in denominations that are no longer pro-life;
such efforts seek to return those denominations to the historical and
Biblical Christian pro-life position. Various meetings and strategic
sessions have been held this summer.
d) Other Confidential Meetings – Other strategic meetings of
pro-life leaders are held regularly and facilitated by Priests for Life. The
nature of these meetings is confidential and beyond the scope of this
report.
5.
Preparation for the 2012 National Elections
For nearly two decades, Priests for Life has been vocal
and active, in a completely non-partisan way, in the national elections in
the United States. The focus of these efforts has been to a) encourage and
train clergy, churches, and Catholic organizations to call people to
faithful citizenship in full harmony with the teachings of the United States
bishops; b) disseminate the documents of the bishops on the theme of
political responsibility, including the creation of study guides, bulletin
inserts, and sample articles; c) encourage and train people to conduct
non-partisan voter registration, voter education, and get-out-the-vote
drives; d) help other organizations that are structured as 501 (c)(3)
not-for-profit entities to understand more clearly what they can do in this
arena and provide them with training in how to do it; e) raise public
awareness through speaking engagements and the media about the
responsibility to be politically active and the primacy of the right to life
in every election.
In accordance with these aims, Priests for Life has
formed the Vote Pro-life
Coalition, a non-partisan network of over 30 organizations who are
interested in pursuing joint action to increase awareness among their
members regarding how elections work and how they can advance the cause of
life in those elections. The Coalition makes use of internet technologies,
such as webcasts, to educate and mobilize people on short notice.
6. Media
Presentations on the Pro-life Message
Priests for Life has the world’s most widely broadcast
and longest-running series of programs about abortion. Thanks to the Eternal
Word Television Network (EWTN) and Mother Angelica’s invitation to Fr. Frank
Pavone in 1994 to create a series about abortion, the program “Defending
Life” has circled the globe ever since on radio and television, in both
English and Spanish. Current production has doubled, so that two 13-episode
series are created every year, the next one due to be recorded in September
2011. In addition to these half-hour episodes aired several times a week,
Fr. Frank continues to produce, in English and Spanish, short spots that air
during the course of each day. Moreover, radio, TV, and internet broadcasts
continue to be produced by Priests for Life for other outlets, both Catholic
and secular.
Janet
Morana, Priests for Life’s Executive Director, is also currently producing
the EWTN series “The Catholic View for Women,” which she co-hosts along with
Teresa Tomeo and Astrid Bennett-Gutierrez. The first six episodes have aired
and the next 13 are being created now, as is a study guide to accompany the
programs.
Along with this religious media, Fr. Frank continues to
be a key point of contact for the pro-life news items that appear on various
secular networks. Priests for Life implements a year-long plan for
developing relationships with media executives.
7. First
National Sidewalk Counselors’ Training Seminar
Fr. Frank gave the keynote opening address this summer
at the first national training seminar on sidewalk counseling, organized by
the Pro-life Action Ministries, based in St. Paul, MN. Close to a hundred
activist-leaders from around the country, representing groups with which
Priests for Life has worked consistently through the years, attended this
meeting and strategized about how to extend to others this kind of training,
and about what issues were most important to tackle.
8. Synod of
Bishops 2012
Among the various collaborative projects Priests for
Life undertakes with Church offices in Rome, input is now being assembled to
send to the 2012 Synod of Bishops, which will discuss the topic of the “New
Evangelization.” Using the preparatory document (“Lineamenta”) that has
already been issued by the committee preparing the Synod, Priests for Life
will provide reflections as to how the topics of concern to the Synod
incorporate and intersect with the pro-life mission of the Church.
9. Society of
Centurions
For some 18 years, under the leadership of Canadian
psychiatrist Dr. Philip Ney, the Society of Centurions has existed to
provide a mutually encouraging fellowship of those who have used their
professional skills to kill children by abortion, but now have ceased to do
so. Like the Centurion who, upon taking part in the death of Jesus, repented
and declared, “Surely, this was an innocent man,” so the Centurions of
today, having partaken in the deaths of unborn children, have repented and
declared, “Surely, these were innocent lives.”
These individuals need healing, and a helping hand to
walk the difficult path of re-humanizing the children they killed by
re-humanizing themselves. The Society of Centurions provides this path to
healing through powerful seminars that gather and guide such former abortion
providers.
Priests for Life and Fr. Frank Pavone are playing a key
role in announcing and fostering this healing, and in working with Dr. Ney
in both developing and carrying out this unique program. Fr. Frank and Dr.
Ney are currently identifying more Centurions and planning for a gathering
in the near future to bring them through this special process of spiritual
and psychological healing. In his role in assisting former Planned
Parenthood director Abby Johnson in her conversion, Fr. Frank has been
working with her to give guidance to those who, on reading her book or
hearing her story, are deciding to follow in her footsteps and leave the
abortion industry.
10.
Blackstone Fellowship
Fr. Frank taught again this summer in the Blackstone
Fellowship. Organized by the Alliance Defense Fund, this fellowship brings
together hundreds of law students from across the United States to impart to
them a deeper understanding and skill in defending and promoting a Christian
worldview of the law and the current issues facing the law, including the
sanctity of life.
11.
Leadership in other National Events
The entire Pastoral Team of Priests for Life has been
on the road all summer and at the center of all the national initiatives of
the pro-life movement. Our Youth Outreach under Bryan Kemper has toured,
with its interdenominational mission teams, Christian concerts from coast to
coast, setting up pro-life information booths at each stop. Marie Smith and
her husband Congressman Chris Smith have spoken in Rome, and Marie has
continued to assist legislators worldwide with the Parliamentary Network for
Critical Issues (one of our ministries). In its status as an NGO at the
United Nations, Priests for Life continued its work over the summer with
other UN agencies and NGOs, and continued providing assistance to the Holy
See’s Permanent Observer Mission – among other things, having Fr. Frank
Pavone speak to its group of student interns who came to New York for a week
from around the United States. Alveda King brought the pro-life message into
the midst of the media and other events surrounding the dedication of the
new memorial to her uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Washington, DC.
Fr. Frank was the principal speaker at the “Summer of
Mercy” events in Maryland, where pro-life activists gathered from around the
country to protest (and temporarily shut down) the late-terms abortionist
LeRoy Carhart. Fr. Frank was also a principal speaker at the National Right
to Life Convention; at the Operation Save America annual national event at
which he presided over a funeral service for an aborted baby; at the EWTN 30th
Anniversary Family Celebration in Birmingham; at the San Diego West Coast
pro-life conference; at the national convention of the Catholic Marketing
Network; at the international conference of Couples for Christ; at the
Night Vision Christian Festival in
Colorado (where he was joined by other members of the Priests for Life team
to bring, for the first time, a key pro-life theme into this major event);
at the groundbreaking of the nation’s first maternity and pregnancy care
center on a college campus (at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina); and
at the Doylestown, PA Mass to welcome, for her first visit to the United
States, Dr. Gianna Emanuela Molla, the daughter of St Gianna Beretta Molla,
who gave her life for her child. Dr. Molla’s visit to the United States
began with a visit to the Priests for Life headquarters in Staten Island,
NY, where she spoke to the staff and enshrined an image and relic of her
saint-mother.
Aside from these national events, Fr. Frank and the
other priests and lay speakers of Priests for Life presented the pro-life
message at dozens of local pro-life events and rallies across the country.
Priests for Life and its leadership team also continue
to provide strategic guidance to many pro-life initiatives that they have
been involved in getting off the ground.
12. The 20th
Anniversary
The year 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of
the recognition given by Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco in 1991 of
Priests for Life as a Private Association of the Faithful (according to
Canon 299).
In observance of this anniversary, a special 20-year
report on the ministry of Priests for Life is being prepared, as are special
anniversary masses and celebrations.
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