I’ve recently heard from Adrienne Doring, the Respect Life director for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, and Ron Kelsey, the Respect Life director for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. They’re teaming up to help teens in their dioceses start chapters of their new pro-life ministry, Truth Illuminated. Their strategy for getting pro-life clubs started is off to a great start, and I’d love to see more dioceses around the country take a similar approach. An informational meeting held last month about Truth Illuminated was featured in the The Catholic Key:
At the Aug. 25 meeting over pizza at the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocesan chancery, Doring said that Truth Illuminated would follow an “apologetics” model, arming teens with the information they need to communicate the pro-life message effectively. “We want to take this out in the culture and change the culture,” Doring said. She and Kelsey want to see chapters meeting regularly – about once a month – in convenient locations in several parishes and schools. “It’s not practical for people to be driving 45 minutes to a meeting across the city,” she said. “We need to localize it.” The chapters will be led by teens for teens, Doring said. Adult sponsors will assist, she said, but it is important for teens to take the lead. … Doring said Truth Illuminated will be centered around the pillars of the pro-life movement: prayer, education, outreach and public policy advocacy. “This is a spiritual battle we are in, so prayer is huge,” she said. … In addition to prayer, meetings will also focus on aspects of the church’s rich teaching on beginning and end of life issues. Doring said “middle of life” social justice issues are very important, and the church has rich teachings about the obligations to uphold life at all stages. But she said the diocesan Human Rights office is focusing on those issues while the Respect Life office hones in on issues such as abortion, the protection of human embryonic life in research, the death penalty and euthanasia. But in order to defend church teaching, it is necessary to learn it, Doring said. “It is amazing how poorly catechized our own Catholics are,” she said. But once people of good will learn the truth about the attacks on life at the beginning and end, they become pro-life, she said. … “The reason we are so active and so impassioned about this is because we are Christian,” she said. “We have to be secure in our own faith because our work will flow from our faith.”
Read the whole thing here.
