Eye-opening & Innovative

Thank you for your interview with Paul Swope (“Awakening the Voice of Conscience,” July 5-11). His approach to the pro-life message is refreshing and eye-opening.

The wonderful pro-life apostolates that have fought so many years for the right to life have had many tangible and intangible successes. More people are against abortion, and many moving personal conversions have come from their efforts.

Yet it is heart-warming to see a new and exciting approach like Swope's television commercials. Instead of confronting an indifferent public audience or a hardened political one, he has tailored commercials to the people who, in the short term, most need the pro-life message: pregnant women in difficult circumstances. And, instead of relying on the smart slogans that have been like mottos to pro-lifers over the years, his innovative research, I hope, will find the right words to say to those women and save lives.

I wanted to write because that story is inspiring, and to thank you for bringing such stories to our attention. We need to hear as many stories as we can about people like Swopes who refuse to spend their time complaining about their friends or worrying about their enemies, but rather spend it smiling, serving those in need, and quietly winning battles for the culture of life.

April Hoopes Falls Church, Virginia

Truly Catholic Colleges

A word of thanks for the enlightening series you ran on Catholic colleges and universities in the past months.

Hopefully this will help tear down the ramparts separating Church and education in America and the Church will reclaim the right to its own identity.

Too long has the “American Church” chafed under the very notion of an external authority that would validate truth. It once claimed that such ecclesiastical norms for Catholic institutions would mean the loss of governing autonomy, accreditation, government and corporate funding, academic freedom and above all, the end of respectability in the eyes of secular universities.

Please God! May the day soon come that a Catholic college's or university's faculties present the Church's perspective on a daily basis as part of its essential, functioning definition.

Aubert Lemise

Peru, Illinois