CNS STORY: Church worker says Africa, Eastern Europe need post-abortion healing

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CNS Story:

ROME-RACHEL May-18-2007 (640 words) With photo. xxxi

Church worker says Africa, Eastern Europe need post-abortion healing

By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- More pastoral care and healing for women and men suffering from the aftermath of abortion are urgently needed, especially in Africa and Eastern Europe, said the founder of Project Rachel.

Getting Project Rachel, the post-abortion healing ministry of the Catholic Church, up and running in countries that completely lack or have limited social services or health care is a priority, Vicki Thorn told Catholic News Service.

Project Rachel currently operates extensive networks in the United States and Canada. While the ministry is also active in the Bahamas, Guam, New Zealand and parts of Australia, more than a dozen other countries are eager to set up Project Rachel in their dioceses, Thorn said May 17.

Religious men and women and laypeople trained in post-abortion ministry can help people heal in places where "mental health professionals are not readily available," such as Africa, parts of Eastern Europe, the Philippines and India, she said.

The church is also an innocuous safe haven for women to talk confidentially about their abortion experience, she said, especially in countries where abortion is illegal or where the culture attaches a strong sense of shame to abortion.

Women can trust that religious men and women are not "going to blab about it," and priests are bound to absolute confidentiality in the sacrament of reconciliation, she added.

Thorn, who is director of the Milwaukee-based National Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing, was in Rome in mid-May, giving talks and offering a day of formation May 18 on Project Rachel.

Approximately 60 people from Italy, other parts of Europe, Mexico and Nigeria came for a one-day course, which was sponsored by the Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Rome, the Italian bishops' conference and the Emmanuel Community.

One woman rode 40 hours by bus from Romania to the formation course so she could bring the information back to her diocese.

And a nun from Nigeria took detailed notes to send back to other nuns in her country.

Holy Child Sister Monica Adigwe told CNS, "I'm going to retype the notes I've scribbled and then send that with the handouts" by express mail "to the two sisters" she knows who are ministering to women in Nigeria.

Thorn said bringing Project Rachel to other countries does not take a lot of money or manpower, and "all you need is just one person" to receive training to start helping people heal.

Most costs are for advertising and educational materials but, "by definition, (the project) is owned by a diocese so a bishop needs to say 'yes'" and approve the ministry, she added.

Thorn has given formation lessons in Hong Kong, Ukraine, Mexico, Austria, Chile and Poland. But she said she has received numerous requests for help in setting up Project Rachel from priests and nuns in India, the Philippines, many African countries and Eastern European nations such as Romania and Lithuania.

She said their appeals are similar: A priest will write her saying, "I'm seeing all these women who have had abortions and I don't know what to do with them."

Thorn said Project Rachel and the manual she wrote for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Post Abortion Ministry: A Resource Manual for Priests," are models "that work everywhere."

The only thing priests, religious and lay workers need to change, she said, is their responses to a person's grief and sense of loss for that particular culture.

For example, she said, workers will have to look at how people grieve in their culture and how to formalize a ritual to help a person pray for and remember the aborted child.

While people can count on God's forgiveness, helping the woman forgive herself "is sometimes the very hardest of all the steps," she said.

END

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