How a summer with the Sisters of Life taught me what it means to be a part of building a Culture of Life and Love.
When people ask what I’m doing this summer, the quick response is that I’ve been interning with the Respect Life Office for the Archdiocese of New York.
The longer answer would be that I’ve been living, praying, and working with the Sisters of Life that run the Respect Life office, at Sacred Heart Convent. The Convent doubles as a Holy Respite, where expectant and parenting moms live and can grow in their identity as a mother and a woman. The past seven weeks have been stretching – Manhattan is not my home town, to say the least – but they have also been some of the most joyful and soul-filling weeks I never knew to ask for.
The Sisters of Life, founded in 1991 by John Joseph Cardinal O’Connor in the Archdiocese of New York, are a contemplative-active order that take the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They also take a fourth vow, to protect and enhance the sacredness of every human life. This fourth vow means that everything they do, prayer, evangelization, mission, finds its heart in building a culture of life. They serve women in crisis pregnancies at Visitation Missions, helping them find prenatal care, parenting support, or abortion alternatives, make adoption plans, or come to grips with difficult diagnoses. They live with pregnant and parenting women, loving them as daughters and loving their children as their own. They advocate for policy and cultural change that recognizes and upholds the dignity of human life. They do so much more. And this summer, they have shown me what it is to be pro-life.
It has been all gift, and entirely grace, to spend this summer learning what it means to live love so radically, and to truly lift up, celebrate, and support mothers, their children, and ALL human life, from conception until natural death. I’ve seen what it means to build a culture of life and a civilization of love, not just in our little office on W 51st St, editing our website or writing our lesson plans for grade school curriculum (as important as that work is), but in welcoming a mom and her newborn home to Holy Respite, in filling out housing applications to help a family move, or in lifting our voices in prayer as three Sisters lay prostrate and made their profession of perpetual vows, including that fourth vow, “to protect and enhance the sacredness of every human life.”
At our Mass before the March for Life this past January, Fr. Jenkins preached: “The heart of the pro-life movement is love,” he said, “for the unborn, for their mothers, and even for those who oppose us.” I loved those words then, and I’ve carried them with me this summer, as I’ve seen that the heart of all the Sisters do is love. It is love for the unborn, for their mothers, for those who oppose us, and it is love for Love Himself. They lay down their lives constantly in self-sacrificial love, and they do that because they know Who first did that for them. They live love so radically, because they are in love with the Love Who invites us to give over our entire selves. John Cardinal O’Connor Spoke of the Sister’s Charism, their gift, in this way:
“We have the Sisters of Life dominantly to love. They will engage in
many apostolic activities, but primarily, they will love, they will love,
they will love. They will love with their own lives, with their own hearts,
with their own prayers, with their own thoughts. They will never look at
anyone except through the eyes of love.”
The heart of the pro-life movement is love. And when we know Love, we can better live out joyful sacrifice for the mothers, fathers, children, and people who need us most. When we know Love, the work we do in evangelization, prayer, service, advocacy, and education all helps other people to come to know Him too – all becomes done out of, for, and with love.
To the women, my Sisters in Christ, who have helped me to see and to come to know Love more and more this summer: words can never express my gratitude. Thank you for the witness of your love, joy, and life in service of this movement and the Lord. Thank you for welcoming me into your home for meals, adventures, work, and prayer. And thank you for sending me back refilled, renewed, and recommitted to bringing Love into my own heart, life, and work.
I have been challenged this summer, more than I could have ever planned for. I’ve been overwhelmed, I’ve felt out of place, and I’ve struggled to find hope when it seems like all of New York, and all of our world, is fostering a culture of death, rather than one of life. But day after day a bell rings in the late afternoon, and I find myself in a familiar pew in a (mercifully) chilly chapel, sitting with the Eucharistic Christ who is Love. There He has, ever so quietly and always so gently, invited me into his Sacred Heart who is Love Himself. It is there that I have been filled, and it is from there that He sends us forth.
Maggie Garnett is the Vice President of Communications for Notre Dame Right to Life, and a sophomore in Walsh Hall. She is studying Theology and Constitutional Studies.