Mother Agnes Mary Donovan has led the Sisters of Life for 15 years. But she considers Cardinal John O’Connor to have been the real leader for the first seven.

The former archbishop of New York founded the Sisters of Life after standing in front of the ovens at Dachau and realizing that people were still deciding that some lives are more worthy than others.

Mother Agnes became a charter member of the community, which is dedicated to the “protection and enhancement of every human life.”

The New Yorker, who taught psychology at Columbia University before professing religious vows, was made the mother general of the community in 1993, although Cardinal O’Connor, she said, remained a hands-on leader of the community until his death in the Jubilee Year in 2000.

Register correspondent Paul Barra spoke to Mother Agnes from her order’s St. Paul’s Convent in Yonkers, N.Y.

Were you always pro-life? And did you know Cardinal O’Connor before you joined your community?

I was active in the pro-life movement before being called to the religious life. I had received that grace [of a religious vocation] and was searching for a community just as the cardinal was founding the Sisters of Life. That was one of God’s coincidences.

I was especially attracted to the fact that the Sisters of Life are a contemplative community. None of us was a religious before, and the Sisters of Life come from all walks of life.

But I should say that being a Sister of Life is not the penultimate expression of respecting the sanctity of life. By that I mean that being called to the religious life is an act of God; other people with other sorts of vocations can also be dedicated to the truth that every person is a precious and unique image of the Son of God.

I did not know Cardinal O’Connor before joining this community, except that I was living in New York and had heard him speak at the Cathedral [St. Patrick’s] and had read about him in the religious and secular press.

We are grateful that he was our charismatic and active founder.

How is your order doing?

We’ve been blessed. God is still calling women to the religious life. He is still granting us those graces.

We now number 61 — 37 in vows, 12 novices and 12 postulants (the newest members) and a number of young women just completing university. And our mission is expanding all the time. We’ll probably open our eighth convent very early in the new year, in the Bronx.

One of our convents is called Holy Respite; it’s where we take in pregnant women and surround them with love and caring. These women are not always in financial distress but they are in fact poor because their pregnancy has created for each of them an untenable situation where they have become vulnerable to abortion.

Our order and our charism were authenticated by the Church on March 25, 2004.

Do the Sisters of Life concentrate on abortion in their dedication to the sanctity of life?

We concentrate on proclaiming the gospel of life, proclaiming the sacredness of all human life and the dignity of every man and woman.

Of course, we do concentrate our efforts on where the faith is most threatened. There’s no dispute about the mystery of the Trinity, for instance, or other aspects of our faith, but there is a question of what people believe about the sanctity of human life, whether we believe that God creates, with intention, every human person. That question threatens our faith.

Are you distressed that Catholics are not often hearing the call to be pro-life from the pulpit at Mass?

I think that’s less often true that you hear nothing. Young priests are preaching about it because they are coming out of the culture of death and they realize that people will not be able to retain their faith if they do not fight against that culture.

The American bishops, for instance, just have promulgated a beautiful document for forming the conscience of Catholic voters, saying that all moral issues are not equal and that voting should be an expression of their faith. There can be no debate, they said, about the sanctity of human life.

Catholics make up 25% of the electorate and can make a difference.

How do you think the pro-life movement is doing?

I see clear signs of progress in three areas: education, service and witness.

In education, I do not think that in any quarter today people doubt the humanity of the unborn. In teens and young adults, the pro-life movement is strong, while the pro-choice movement is gray. We have been able to capture the hearts and minds of the young. Fewer and fewer young doctors want anything to do with abortion.

In service, we have a nationwide network of services available, more than 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers, innumerable homes and residences for pregnant women.

In witness, the movement has been able to keep the issue alive. We’ve made marginal gains of some small ground legally. The president has put two [pro-life] judges on the Supreme Court and that has been a notable achievement.

How does the future look for the pro-life cause?

Nobody can tell the future, you know? But I see indications for hope. I think the American people are too good, too generous, too righteous a people to put up with this forever.

One day the abortion movement will collapse, like the day the Berlin Wall came down — as if out of nowhere. It will really have come, of course, from decades of people working for the sanctity of life.

I don’t know when, but I have no doubt that the culture of death will end.

Paul Barra is based in

Reidville, South Carolina.