Religious women help launch program to combat sexual abuse, ‘create a culture of care’

Every Tuesday evening at 10 p.m., between 800 and 900 students converge on the historic St. Joseph’s Chapel at Lille Catholic University for a candlelight Mass. / Credit: Courtesy of Prudence Cuypers

National Catholic Register, Apr 27, 2024 / 0… […]

Denver, Colo., Apr 17, 2019 / 04:17 pm (CNA).- Many years before she entered religious life, Sister Mary Gianna Thornby was an ordinary high school sophomore at Columbine High School in the suburbs of Denver.

Like many high schoolers, she occasionally struggled with her identity, had experienced some bullying in middle school, and ultimately just wanted to fit in. She wasn’t raised in a Christian home; at that time, God, faith – and certainly the Catholic Church – didn’t register on her radar.

“Growing up, I didn’t really know if God existed or not, or that He had a plan,” Mary Gianna told CNA.

All that changed 20 years ago on April 20, 1999.

Mary Gianna had a habit, she said, of going to the library to study every single day during lunch period her freshman and sophomore years. During her sophomore year, she and a friend even changed their schedules so they would have two hours off during lunch to study together in the library.

That April morning, sitting in art class right before the lunch hour, Mary Gianna said she felt an overwhelming urge to leave school. She says she remembers thinking: “I’m going to go home, and no one’s going to talk me out of not leaving.”

Her friend was confused, and asked Mary Gianna why they weren’t going to the library like they always did. She suggested they go and study for an upcoming test at a restaurant instead, so they walked out of the school and hopped into Mary Gianna’s car, which her dad had only just bought her the week before.

As they were driving away, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw hundreds of her schoolmates running out of the school building.

With no idea what was going on, Mary and her friend simply continued on and arrived at a bagel shop. It was there that they heard what had happened.

On that morning, two students – 17 and 18 years old – began shooting people outside the high school, ultimately killing 13 and wounding more than 20 others before taking their own lives as well.

The violence perpetrated at Columbine would remain the most deadly shooting at a U.S. high school until February 2018, when 17 students died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Florida.

Mary Gianna soon learned that most of the killings took place in the library – the place where, on any other day, she would have surely been during that exact time.

“And so I wondered: why wasn’t I there?” she mused. “Every other day I was there, but that one day – what gave me that urge to leave?”

She remembers being told by someone: “God must have a plan for your life.”

“I realized God existed, and He had a plan, but at the time I didn’t know who God was. And at the time, people were questioning how could God allow something like this to happen,” Mary Gianna said.

Every day, the next school year, she would walk by the spot where the library used to be – since so many of the killings took place there, it was demolished and eventually rebuilt in a different spot – wondering why she had been spared. At that time, she had the stirrings of faith, but still no clear answers.

She said she started drinking, going to parties, looking for other things to offer fulfillment – but she knew in her heart it wasn’t where she was supposed to be. Her senior year, she said, she felt like she had finally reached “rock-bottom” and lost all hope.

“It was in those moments that I felt like I just couldn’t go on in life that one of my friends invited me to the Catholic Church at St. Francis Cabrini in Littleton, Colorado,” she said.

Immediately upon walking in, she met a representative of Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, who encouraged her to consider going there for college. She also met a youth minister named Kate.

“She started telling me about a God that passionately loved me,” Mary Gianna recalled.

Kate started taking her out for coffee and telling her about God’s love – that He does have a plan, that Mary Gianna was made in his image and likeness. Growing up, she had no direction in life, Mary Gianna said, and God’s love was that thing that she had been missing.

“Not only did God lead me out of Columbine that day – he was leading me home on that day. He was leading me to Himself,” Mary Gianna said.

“And I wanted to say ‘yes’ with all my heart to God’s plan. I realized that He had a plan, and I wanted to say ‘yes’ to that plan.”

She ended up enrolling at Franciscan University, even though at first her father had misgivings about the cost. Later on, however, it seemed his heart had been changed. Mary Gianna said her parents were very supportive of her faith and the direction her life took after her conversion.

She went through RCIA her freshman year at Franciscan, and at the Easter vigil Mass on March 30, 2002 at the age of 19, she was received into the Catholic Church.

Mary Gianna experienced the call to religious life in 2008, when she went to the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota and prayed that she would be able to enter into the Mass in a way she had never experienced before.

It was through Mass that she felt God’s presence before her. She walked out of the chapel changed; all she wanted was religious life.

She chose a charismatic, Franciscan, contemplative, and missionary order called the Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, which brought her to Prayer Town, Texas, northwest of Amarillo. She pronounced her final vows on August 4, 2018.

Twenty years on from the Columbine tragedy, Mary Gianna said she thinks more of her former classmates are finding the strength to talk about what happened that day. She said she keeps in touch with some of her classmates, teachers, and the former principal of the school, especially her friend who left the school with her that day. They’ve talked about the experience since.

“I often think of the greatest tragedy of Jesus being put to death on the cross, and how it led to our salvation, and that even in the midst of the tragedy at Columbine, God can bring good,” she reflected.

“That He would bring life out of death. And I think we’ve seen that in a lot of ways.”

She mentioned the widely-known story of Rachel Joy Scott, a passionately Christian teenager who was one of the first Columbine students killed during the massacre. Rachel reportedly told her teacher shortly before her death that she thought she was going to have a “major impact in the world,” and she always took care to reach out to the “new kid” in school and those who had been bullied or had no one to sit with at lunch.

Witnesses said the gunmen asked another student if she believed in God, and she answered yes. Then they shot her.

“I was amazed that: here was a girl from my high school who was so passionate about her faith that she was willing to say ‘yes’ and die for Christ,” Mary Gianna reflected.

“And I thought: what would I have said? I could have easily been there that day. I didn’t have faith. But then I realized: God knew this is where I would be. That if she was able to say ‘yes’ and die for Christ, I can say ‘yes’ and live for him. And that’s what truly inspired me to really say ‘yes,’ to live for Him.”

The religious sister says the Lord took her from a life of despair and hopelessness to a place of great joy for life, and a desire to share the “fullness of life” with others.

“I really feel like the sufferings I’ve had in this life; I think it’s kept me close to the Lord. And I think it’s the call to trust God, that He never allows a tragedy or a heartbreak to happen unless He can bring a greater good out of it,” she said.

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Washington D.C., Mar 4, 2020 / 01:05 pm (CNA).- The Supreme Court heard arguments on Louisiana’s Unsafe Abortion Protection Act on Wednesday, as justices questioned lawyers from both sides on the state’s safety regulations for abortion clinics, including a requirement that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

The court met March 4 to hear oral arguments in the case of June Medical Services v. Russo. As justices probed the necessity of the state’s requirements, outside the court an advocate for post-abortive women took issue with the justices’ skepticism toward the law.

Cynthia Collins, founder of the Louisiana Abortion Recovery Alliance, and herself a post-abortive woman, told CNA after arguments that the justices “were trying to silence our voices, of the women that have been hurt by abortion.”

“And their voices are the same as the abortionists, to get up, get out, and stay silent, when we’ve been injured by abortion,” she said.

The Louisiana law (Act 620) was enacted in 2014 and requires that abortionists in the state have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles in case of complications that may arise during or after the procedure. The law would hold abortion clinics to the same safety standards that apply to other medical clinics in the state.

The Shreveport abortion clinic Hope Medical Group for Women sued, saying the regulations posed an undue burden on the ability of women to have an abortion.

A district court first issued a restraining order on the enforcement of the law’s penalties. Then, in 2016, the court issued a preliminary injunction on the law. Later that year, after the Supreme Court later struck down a similar Texas law in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the district court permanently enjoined Louisiana’s law from going into effect.

That decision was reversed by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals which said that the law posed a benefit to women’s health and did not put substantial burdens on abortion in the state.

Unlike in Texas where most clinics closed because of its law, “only one doctor at one clinic is currently unable to obtain [admitting] privileges” in Louisiana, the Fifth Circuit said. 

Reviewing the evidence of the case before the district circuit, the Fifth Circuit also found that some abortionists did not try hard enough to obtain admitting privileges at hospitals.

The case went to the Supreme Court, and more than 200 members of Congress signed an amicus brief in favor of the law. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), who is facing a tough primary battle against a pro-abortion opponent, signed the brief, an act his opponent Marie Newman highlighted in an attack against him.

Wednesday’s arguments focused on two main questions—on whether an abortion clinic, rather than women in the state, has “third-party standing” to bring such a case before the Court, and whether the admitting privileges requirements violate the Constitution by imposing a substantial burden on legal abortion rights.

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—the newest justices on the bench who could be deciding votes in a 5-4 case—said little on Wednesday, with Justice Samuel Alito being the most vocal member in questioning the abortion clinic’s case against the law.

The “third-party standing” question referred to the legitimacy of abortion clinics, instead of women of the state, arguing before the Court that the law would substantially burden abortion.

Elizabeth Murrill, Louisiana’s Solicitor General arguing in favor of the law, said that “these doctors should not be able to challenge regulations intended to protect a certain class of people.”

The attorney representing June Medical Services, L.L.C., defended the rights of abortion clinics to bring “third-party” lawsuits against state laws, even if a conflict of interest might exist between the clinics’ desire to do business and the safety of women they claim to represent.

Justice Alito called the argument “amazing.” 

“You think that if the plaintiff actually has interests that are directly contrary to those individuals on whose behalf the plaintiff is claiming to sue, nevertheless that plaintiff can have standing?”  

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly asked why the admitting privileges requirement was relevant to women’s health, given that many women might experience abortion-related complications at home, after having visited a clinic, and thus would go to the hospital by themselves.

Questions also arose as to whether Louisiana’s law is substantially different from Texas regulations struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016 in the Hellerstedt case, with lawyers for the state arguing that the law was “justified by abundant evidence of life-threatening health and safety violations, malpractice, noncompliance with professional licensing rules, legislative testimony from post-abortive women, [and] testimony from doctors who took care of abortion providers’ abandoned patients.”

In one case, Murrill said, an abortionist testified that he transferred four women to a hospital for abortion-related hemorrhaging. The same doctor also admitted in testimony that he hired a radiologist and an ophthalmologist to do abortions, she said, posing clear safety risks to women.

Jeffrey Wall, U.S. Principal Deputy Solicitor General who argued in support of Louisiana’s law on Wednesday, noted that the doctor’s testimony of transferring the four women to hospitals was proof that, while “often” complications might be experienced by women at their home and not at the clinic, they “sometimes” do occur while women are still at the clinic.

In such cases, Wall said, the best practice would be admission to a hospital—something backed up even by the abortionist’s testimony.

Abortionists “could and did” obtain admitting privileges at hospitals, she said, but did not maintain close relationships with their patients who had to litigate their own cases involving harmful effects of abortion.

The chair of the pro-life committee of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, said on Wednesday that states “have a strong interest in regulating a procedure which is lethal to children and immensely damaging to women.”

“Women, their bodies, and their babies are immeasurably valuable,” the archbishop said in a statement. “It adds insult to injury, and speaks to the callousness of the abortion industry, that providers are seeking to overturn basic, standard protections for women seeking this life-altering procedure.”

In his statement issued after Wednesday’s oral arguments, Archbishop Naumann called on Catholics to pray for the outcome.

“The Catholic Church encourages all people of faith to pray about the outcome to this very important case,” Archbishop Naumann stated on Wednesday.

“We also ask all to pray for the women who are compelled to seek abortion: that they may find alternatives that value their health and well-being, and the lives of their precious children.”

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