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Fredericksburg, Va., Apr 3, 2018 / 01:07 pm (CNA).- David Bereit, the founder of 40 Days for Life, entered the Catholic Church on Easter, giving thanks for the inspiration of influential Catholics, including his wife and children.

“After years of prayer, discernment, and a whole lot of wrestling with God, I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church at last night’s Easter Vigil,” wrote Bereit in an April 1 Facebook post.

Bereit celebrated Easter with his family at St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His wife Margaret was his sponsor, and his son Patrick was an altar server at the Mass. His daughter Claire and mother-in-law Helen were also in attendance.

Bereit said that he had been attending Sunday Mass with his wife – who is Catholic – every week for the last 28 years, ever since their second date at St. Mary’s Catholic Center at Texas A&M in 1990.

But while he and Margaret shared many things in common as Christians, Bereit said he also longed to be more unified in their church affiliation and therefore spent years wrestling with the Catholic Church.

“I struggled with many questions, misconceptions, and hangups along the way. I have endeavored to continually learn and grow through prayer, studying Scripture, theology, and church history, reading, and seeking wise counsel,” he said.

“Throughout my life I have also been surrounded by many amazing Catholic Christians whose faithful, loving witness has continually inspired and attracted me – most notably the beautiful example lived out by my incredible wife and wonderful children.”

Last September, Bereit experienced a profound encounter of faith during Eucharistic adoration. Soon after, he began attending RCIA classes, which he said led to a more fruitful Lent and Easter this year.

“Lent took on far more meaning than usual for me, as I prayed and fasted more intensely than ever with a focused desire to continue growing closer to Christ. Now I am filled with joy, and am at complete peace, about this next step in my life-long journey of faith.”

In 2004, Bereit began 40 Days for Life as a local prolife advocacy group in Bryan-College Station, Texas. The group has grown into an international organization, holding Christian campaigns of prayer and activism to end abortion. Over the course of 40 days, participants hold a 24/7 prayer vigil outside of a single abortion facility in the community. The organization also engages in community outreach, through partnerships with churches and door-to-door petitions.

Bereit stepped down as CEO in 2016, but continues to be actively involved in the pro-life movement.

He said in his Facebook post that his decision to become Catholic may be surprising to some, but it will not change his dedication to serve the entire body of Christ.

“This journey has deepened my appreciation for a wonderful Christian upbringing, my years of experiences within the Presbyterian Church, the time I was involved with Evangelical ministries while in college, and the blessing of getting to work and pray alongside the many different parts of the Body of Christ in my 15+ years of pro-life work.”

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Los Angeles, Calif., Apr 3, 2018 / 12:38 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles has signed 17 new protocols recognizing the Native Americans of California as the “First People of the Land” and offering guidelines for past… […]

Washington D.C., Apr 2, 2018 / 04:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A federal judge ruled in favor of the Catholic Benefits Association last week, issuing a permanent injunction and declaratory relief against the Department of Health and Human Services’ co… […]

Fort Worth, Texas, Apr 2, 2018 / 03:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- At the Chrism Mass celebrated during Holy Week, a Texas bishop offered reflections on the Church’s liturgical life, telling priests the straying from liturgical texts can be detrimental … […]

Phoenix, Ariz., Apr 2, 2018 / 12:44 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- An upcoming online workshop hosted by the Catholic women’s ministry Blessed Is She will be discussing the topic of infertility and miscarriage.

The workshop, “Love and Longing: A Con… […]

Washington D.C., Apr 2, 2018 / 03:39 am (CNA).- According to the Pew Research Center, only 46 percent of Americans under the age of 18 live in a traditional family with two parents in their first marriage.

For those who are now adults and grew up in a divorced family, the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C. is seeking to help heal wounds that remain after parents divorce.

Many suffer silently from their parents’ divorce, according to Daniel Meola, who leads the ‘Recovering Origins” healing retreats for the shrine.

“Regardless of the amount of individual love our parents give us, what we’ve lost is the love of our parents together,” Meola explained to CNA, drawing on his own experience of his parents’ divorce. “We have to recognize that we have something to grieve.”

“Children of divorce are not, as a rule, asked how they feel about their parents’ divorce — not as a child and not in the decades that follow,” Catholic writer, Leila Miller, wrote in her 2017 book, “Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak.”

“Our society says that the kids should be alright. There should be no problem. There’s a lot of happy divorce talk … so that can kind of silence us,” explained Meola.

Although many children of divorce learn to silence their feelings, their wounds really begin to show themselves in young adulthood and in the ability to form and maintain relationships, according to Meola.

There can be “this deeper anxiety that many of us have that any good thing can turn bad at the drop of the hat or always expecting the piano to fall,” said Meola, who added that trust issues, anger, and depression are other common struggles.

Many participants in past retreats have expressed fear of repeating their parents’ mistakes. The key to addressing this concern is practicing the Church’s teaching of merciful love, Meola said.

“The form of marriage is merciful love … I think that if we can forgive our parents or even just start to forgive them that we will be starting a really good foundation for our own love and our own marriages,” he commented.

“You can love your parents and still hate the divorce,” explained Meola. “We have this beautiful distinction in the Church, at least I found very comforting, between the person and his acts. I found this very comforting actually for grieving that ‘Ok, I can hate this act my parents did, but I can still love this person deeply and profoundly.’”

“I’ve always found it really beautiful and fascinating that Christ’s strongest words on marriage in Matthew 19, saying it is indissoluble, are preceded by his strongest words on forgiveness in Matthew 18 where he tells people to forgive 77 times 7 times,” he continued. “I think that what the Scripture is suggesting there is that the form of indissolubility is merciful love.”

The Church’s teaching on self-giving love in marriage can also seem counterintuitive to adult children of divorce. “I think that one of the temptations when you are wounded is you just want to self-protect rather than give, even though giving is what is key for happiness, especially in love,” explained Meola. “Another sign of self-protecting is leaving at the first sign of problems and not addressing conflicts.”

“Cohabitation can also be a form of self-protecting,” he added.

The goal of the retreats is for the participants to bring these wounds and anxieties to Christ’s healing love. “As John Paul II said in Salvifici Doloris, if we have eyes of faith and we encounter Christ in the wound, then it can awaken love. That is the deepest level of healing that we are looking for.”

At the heart of each retreat is a detailed meditation on the Our Father. Small group discussions focus on more practical aspects of navigating healthy boundaries with one’s parents and in relationships after divorce.

“When your parents divorce, they are in survival mode and so are you, and what often happens is that you feel like you need to be the parent to the parent, rather than the child. And what I mean by that is that they often turn to you as their emotional confidant because they do not have their spouse any longer, so what happens is you don’t feel the permission to share your feelings with them because they are dumping so much on you and you feel the need to help them figure out their emotional life. But in a healthy marriage, it is flipped — the child is supposed to be getting direction about their emotional life from the parent … when you are married, you need to be each other’s emotional confidant… We do have to draw a boundary,” explained Meola.

“We tend to think of boundaries as pushing the other person away, but they are actually at the service of reconciliation and having a good relationship. Because what is going to push you away is if you have an unhealthy relationship. You are going to collapse and get really angry. Boundaries are actually at the service of a good relationship with your parents,” he continued.

“Verbal abuse can be very prolific. Because we are a child of both parents, when one parent bashes the other parent, that really hurts us, because we are a fruit of that, we have qualities of that parent that they might be bashing,” continued Meola who said that the retreat can empower young people to speak up when this occurs.

“Each parent is half of who the child is. When the parents reject each other, they are rejecting half of the child. They may tell the child, ‘We still love you; we just don’t love each other.’ The child cannot make sense of this impossible contradiction. In my opinion, this is the underlying reason for the well-documented psychological, physiological, and spiritual risks that children of divorce face,” wrote Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, the founder and president of the Ruth Institute, in the introduction to Miller’s book on adult children of divorce.

The “Recovering Origins” healing retreat was born out of an earlier symposium hosted by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in 2012 that brought together scholars who have studied the impact divorce has had on children, including Elizabeth Marquardt, whose groundbreaking book, “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce,” was one of the first studies on the impact of divorce on young people.

Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, saw how fruitful the symposium was, and decided that the Church should offer more opportunities for healing. The Knights of Columbus and the John Paul II Institute developed the retreat, which was first held in 2016.

Each retreat is usually capped at 25 participants to encourage discussion. Speakers at the last retreat at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine on March 23-25 included Fr. Jim McCormick, MIC and Dr. Jill Verschaetse, both of whom are adult children of divorce.

The next retreat is scheduled for September 7-9 in Arlington, Virginia.

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Washington D.C., Mar 29, 2018 / 04:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- For the fourth time in his pontificate, Pope Francis will wash the feet of inmates at a prison on Holy Thursday this year.

The pope, who will celebrate the Mass of the Lord’s Supper at the Regina Coeli prison in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, has previously spoken of the importance of reintegrating former prisoners back into society.

In the United States, 65 million people have a criminal record, which can limit access to employment, housing, and education, according to James Ackerman, the president and CEO of Prison Fellowship, the nation’s largest Christian ministry serving prisoners.

“Nearly 700,000 men and women will return to our communities this year alone. Thus, it is smart…for us to implement a more restorative approach for to criminal justice, re-entry, and, in particular, employment for people with a criminal record,” said Ackeman at a prison reform panel at the National Press Club on March 28.

Lily Gonzalez was one of the panelists at the “Second Chances: Removing Barriers to Returning Citizens” event. She shared the difficulties she faced in pursuing an education after being released from prison, in which she spent extensive time in solitary confinement.

Homeboy Industries, a ministry founded by a Jesuit priest, Father Greg Boyle, helped her through their “pathways to college program.”

“It really did take a village,” reflected Gonzalez, who said that the generosity of others helped her pay for her books and parking. However, she continued to face obstacles due to her criminal record after she graduated from college.

“I had a bachelor degree and no one wanted to hire me,” she said.

This barrier to employment and other necessities to reintegrate into society can often feel like a “second prison” after one has served their time, according to Ackerman. A conviction can become a life sentence to joblessness, which can increase the likelihood of future arrests.

This issue has led several U.S. states pass laws that “Ban the Box,” which prevents inquiries about someone’s criminal record on initial job applications, postponing the inquiries until later in the application process.

“I think that when you have a box on the application you are asking the person, ‘Tell me about the worst thing that you have ever done in your life,’ and then as a recruiter I’m going to judge you based on that. I wouldn’t ask anyone that, and I don’t need to know that at that point in the process,” said a human resources executive with Butterball Farms, Bonnie Mroczek.

She shared the positive results Butterball has seen hiring former inmates.

“We’ve been hiring returning citizens for 23 years. We’ve had tons of success with it and we are sharing information with other companies about the success that we’ve had,” she said.

“In states and localities where there has been an evaluation of Ban the Box programs, we see that there is about a 40% increase in people with records getting hired as a result of simply postponing an inquiry about their record,” added Judy Conti, who is the federal advocacy coordinator at the National Employment Law Project.

“If you haven’t met me, you haven’t had a chance to talk to me and get to know who I am,” said Dennis Avila, one of the former prisoners who shared his story.

“I have convictions that involve drugs and firearms … If you just look at some of the worst things that I have done, you would just think that I was this crazy person, which isn’t true at all …coming out of prison and trying to get a job to sustain me and my family was really really hard.”

Avila had a son when he was convicted, and he was not alone in that fact. There are 2.7 million children in the U.S. with a parent in prison, according to Prison Fellowship.

Avila eventually went on to found his own nonprofit organization that uses music to positively impact people from challenging backgrounds and circumstances.

“We are proud that today a full 25% of our field staff are people who were once caught up in the cycle of crime and incarceration, but today are now part of the cycle of renewal,” shared the CEO of Christian Prison Fellowship, who spoke of the importance of engaging prisoners in “a dignified manner and help them to become healthier and more productive citizens.”

Prison Fellowship is currently active in 428 prisons across the country. According to their website, the ministry is “founded on the conviction that all people are created in God’s image and that no life is beyond God’s reach. As Christians, we believe that Jesus – Himself brought to trial, executed, buried, and brought to life again – offers hope, healing, and a new purpose for each life. He can make even the most broken people and situations whole again.”

The fellowship was founded in 1976 by Charles Colson in 1976 after he served seven months prison for his involvement in Watergate as a former aid to President Richard Nixon.

Colson rediscovered his faith during his time in prison. In a book entitled “Loving God: The Cost of Being a Christian,” Colson wrote the following about founding a prison ministry that has impacted the lives of thousands of people:

“My life of success was not what made this morning so glorious — all my achievements meant nothing in God’s economy. No, the real legacy of my life was my biggest failure — that I was an ex-convict. My greatest humiliation — being sent to prison — was the beginning of God’s greatest use of my life; He chose the one thing in which I could not glory for His glory.”

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Gallup, N.M., Mar 29, 2018 / 11:21 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As the Catholic Church prepares to receive thousands of Catholic converts this Easter, Sacred Heart Cathedral in Gallup, N.M., is preparing to receive seven. Gallup’s bishop says he is grate… […]

Hartford, Conn., Mar 28, 2018 / 10:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In light of Holy Week, the Knights of Columbus announced that it will be donating more than $1 million to aid persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

“As we recall the passion, death a… […]

Denver, Colo., Mar 28, 2018 / 07:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A recent study shows that when it comes to upward economic mobility, family and community makes a notable difference in the lives of black boys.

The study found that significant gaps exist between black and white boys when it comes to upward economic mobility throughout their lifetimes, while these differences are nearly non-existent between black and white girls.

While racism is widely considered to be a factor in that economic disparity between white and black boys, numerous other factors are also at play, according to the study conducted by researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie Jones, and Sonya Porter at The Equality of Opportunity Project.

Black boys on the whole face an upward economic mobility gap even when raised in similar neighborhoods, families and income levels as white boys, the study found.

But the study found one notable exception – black boys from impoverished neighborhoods do as well as white boys from similar neighborhoods when there are a lot of black fathers and married couples present in the community. The study found that the presence of fathers matters at a community level, meaning that even black boys without resident fathers did as well as white boys, if they came from communities with high concentrations of black fathers and married couples.

“That is a pathbreaking finding,” William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist who studies economic struggles of black men, told the New York Times. “They’re not talking about the direct effects of a boy’s own parents’ marital status. They’re talking about the presence of fathers in a given census tract.”

Some responses to the study have claimed that family structure matters minimally for the upward mobility of black boys. However, Dr. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, told CNA that those takes ignore this important finding about marriage structure at the neighborhood level.

Those “are obviously two important family structure indicators that matter at the neighborhood level, so the point there is it’s not just what happens in the individual households, but what’s sort of happening to the family in your neighborhood or your community that would seem to matter for mobility,” Wilcox told CNA.

Wilcox also noted in an article on the study that on the whole, young black men are much more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than young white men, so “if you control for household income growing up, you miss the ways in which racial differences in family structure affect outcomes for boys via their impact on family income.”

Furthermore, the study compares the household income of black boys to their individual income as grown men. Wilcox said a more accurate comparison would be to compare the household income of black boys to the household income of those same boys when they reach adulthood, in order to measure the impact that marriage and family structure continues to have on income.

“I think you would find a very different story, because as they note in the study, blacks marry at much lower levels than do whites, and…you do find that the family structure plays a major role in accounting for the contemporary family income gap, or household income gap between blacks and whites today,” he said.

Bishop Shelton Fabre, chair of United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Subcommittee for African-American Catholics, told CNA that this study shows the need to support and encourage marriage and fatherhood in all communities.

“I know that its manifestation in the African American community is unique, but I think in many cultures, that the whole notion of what it means to be a father, and how to support men who are fathers, and to call men to fatherhood, I think that that’s a need,” he said, “more than just in the African American community.”

The Church can and does encourage fatherhood and married couples especially through marriage preparation programs, Fabre said, as well as Marriage Encounter retreats that support couples throughout their marriage.

Furthermore, the rise of apostolates geared toward men, such as “That Man is You”, show the growing need for providing support for fathers and men in the Christian community, Fabre noted.

“That Man is You” is a Catholic ministry for men that says it “honestly addresses the pressures and temptations that men face in our modern culture, especially those relating to their roles as husbands and fathers.”

The Church is also able to fill in some of the gaps in places where fewer fathers are present, Fabre noted, through mentorship programs at the parish level or through organizations such as the Knights of St. Peter Claver. The Knights of St. Peter Claver is the largest African American Catholic lay organization in the United States, and “provides mentorship and opportunities for young black men to come to know their faith, and that mentorship certainly would get into what does it mean to be a good father,” Fabre said.

It’s important that the Church emphasize the unique things that fathers and mothers bring to families, Fabre added.

“A mother’s love, and a mother’s example, are unique. But the role of father is unique as well. The father brings that sense of security and stability, and other things that young men need to come to know,” he said. “I think mothers provide a lot, but for a young man to have a father to guide him, and to just listen to him and bounce ideas off of him, and help him to learn from his mistakes, and to make his choice that much sweeter, I think that’s the role of a father. I think it’s because a father has a particular role, and a mother has a particular role in the family. And children need that.”

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