Filanthropy Friday

This week I was listening to Fresh Air, as I often do when driving Cub home from school.   The guest was Pat Farrell, president of the Leadership Conference of the Women Religious (which represents 80% of the Catholic sisters in the US).  As a former Catholic, I found the conversation fascinating.

Essentially, the LCWR has been reprimanded by the Vatican for "Undermining Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality and birth control and promoting 'radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.'".  However interesting, this is not what really got me thinking about Filanthropy Friday.

At one point during the interview, Terry Gross asked sister Pat Farrell about the LCWR's position on abortion (because they have been criticized by the Vatican for not having a stronger and more vocal anti-abortion position).  I loved Ms. Farrell's response (and I'm just going to copy her quote because she's so eloquent and I could not possibly paraphrase it well):

"I think the criticism of what we're not talking about seems to me to be unfair. Because [Women] Religious have clearly given our lives to supporting life, to supporting the dignity of human persons. Our works are very much pro-life. We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-fetus than actually pro-life. If the rights of the unborn trump all of the rights of all of those who are already born, that is a distortion, too — if there's such an emphasis on that. However, we have sisters who work in right-to-life issues. We also have many, many ministries that support life. We dedicate to our lives to those on the margins of society, many of whom are considered throwaway people: the impaired, the chronically mentally ill, the elderly, the incarcerated, to the people on death row. We have strongly spoken out against the death penalty, against war, hunger. All of those are right-to-life issues. There's so much being said about abortion that is often phrased in such extreme and such polarizing terms that to choose not to enter into a debate that is so widely covered by other sectors of the Catholic Church — and we have been giving voice to other issues that are less covered but are equally as important.

I'm not Catholic, but her response made me proud.  

It made me think about those on the margins of society, the ones that don't get as much attention and it made me want to focus this week's Filanthropy Friday on a less-publicized "right to life" issue.

Coincidentally (or maybe because the universe aligns itself sometimes), one of my good blogger friends has been writing about The Red Thread Movement.   The Red Thread Movement is dedicated to ending human trafficing and sexual slavery, specifically in Nepal.  This seems like a very worthy right to life issue for this week.

This week, I donated $20 to The Red Thread Movement and thank my blogger friend for introducing me to the charity.