Protecting life from birth to death

Paulette Vernay talks about building up Respect Life programs in the diocese and her goal to have a pro-life coordinator in every Hawaii parish

By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald

Paulette Vernay, the Diocese of Honolulu’s Respect Life director, has been in the role for a year now. However, her diocesan work has involved pro-life ministry for two decades and she has been with the diocese since 1998.

Besides helping parishes foster pro-life ministries, the Respect Life office runs Project Rachel, a highly confidential post-abortion counseling service with trained priests and lay counselors, and Rachel’s Vineyard, a weekend retreat of 7-10 people going through a process of healing after having an abortion. The office also has two volunteer Natural Family Planning coordinators and currently plans an annual Life Symposium.

What follows are excerpts from the Hawaii Catholic Herald’s interview with Vernay on her role as Respect Life director.

This last year when I first began, I actually decided I had to set a mission for myself because you can’t have programs in parishes unless you have the right people in every parish.

The third annual Life Symposium was one of my larger efforts. This was a big one last year because it ended up being a 10-day mission with all the islands involved.

With diocesan Respect Life ministry, we follow the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. There is a guideline in there that speaks about parish Respect Life coordinators and what their role is in the parish. It’s about starting in small ways, especially if a parish does not or has not been active in Respect Life ministry before.

What I’m trying to do here is get every parish to have a parish Respect Life coordinator. [Currently 49 out of 66 parishes have one.] To do that, I contact the pastors and I ask them to discern who this person may be. They have to have a passion and feel the desire and the love for all of human life and they have to really be living in communion with the church’s teachings so they can have no doubts about what is pro-life as opposed to what is pro-choice. So you’ve got to always be for life, from conception to natural death.

About 75-80% percent of our parishes have Respect Life coordinators. However, they are not all active. When they first start, I meet with each one individually for approximately two hours and I do an orientation on Respect Life and its history. I go through the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities with them. I refer them to “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life,” a 1995 encyclical by Pope John Paul II). I give them a lot of information from the USCCB and packages of brochures and prayer cards to distribute so they can begin doing something immediately. And I connect them with their vicariate coordinator. And then that person takes them under their wing. The vicariate coordinators are very, very instrumental and meet quarterly if not more with the coordinators in their areas.

They offer support and they exchange their successes and their challenges for the most part. It’s great when the coordinators can form a committee because it’s really a rough thing for one person to try to do everything. It’s very easy to become burnt out and to get discouraged as well as to do nothing. Plus it’s discouraging for the parish to have nothing happening. It’s very important that the pastor takes an active role in Respect Life ministry and that if individual parishes don’t have much, then they all come together as a vicariate and plan something out.

I’m also in the process of assessing parish Respect Life ministries via survey, vicariate by vicariate. I’ve completed Maui/Molokai/Lanai and Kauai, I’m almost done with Oahu and I still need to do the Big Island. We want to know what resources you have that you can share among all of the parishes? And what kind of support do you need from the diocesan Respect Life Ministry?

I send out regular updates on things to do and upcoming events and issues to be aware of. For instance, for the USCCB’s “40 Days for Life,” campaign, if there is no Planned Parenthood facility near you, I say pray in your parish and outside it where you are visible to the street traffic. Hold up your signs, have your prayer vigil there because you are right there being the witness to Jesus in your own community. And that’s very important because it can save a mother’s life, a baby’s life, a family’s life, just by the things that they read during “40 Days for Life” and other prayer vigils held outside the parishes or a simple rosary for life.

We do ask that people remain positive with their messages and in line with USCCB-provided resources. If they have any questions about what is appropriate, they can email me. They can go to their pastor. Any activity that the Respect Life committees might come up with has to be presented to the pastor, which is why we suggest planning out a whole calendar year of activities. And the activities don’t have to be so intense that you’re doing one a month. You know, once a quarter is great.

Once a year I try to have a conference of all Respect Life coordinators, and I try to fund 50% of their airfares because I know parish budgets are tight.

Respect Life ministry is a sign to the community that life should be sacred and that all life is given respect and dignity. It’s a growing ministry and it’s an exciting ministry. Sometimes it’s a ministry of mystery because you don’t know what’s coming up next in the news, or what will be the next threat to life.

It’s mindboggling how humankind can think of ways to destroy itself. In this day and age, it seems we’re becoming so insensitive to life. That’s why it’s so important that parishes begin building this culture of life. It needs to be visible, visible in the way of small activities, visible in the way of homilies. We’re so uncatechized today that people don’t always know what the church exactly teaches on life.

I don’t apply any pressure to parish coordinators because this is a difficult ministry and people tend to walk the other way when they think it’s only about abortion. But there’s so many other things involved. There’s natural family planning issues. How about the elderly? How do we look after them? There’s so much elderly neglect and abuse. And what about domestic violence? We’re trying to promote adoption over abortion. Suicide is another issue. How do we care for our loved ones at the end of life?

I’m trying to find speakers on all these different issues and build a really good speakers bank. We want to get more parishes involved in the annual March for Life and increase awareness about standing up for life.

I still have my hands on several other things within the diocese, but I really do want the focus to be more about Respect Life. It deserves a whole lot more time.

I realize now how difficult last year was for me because I just felt so unworthy at times. But God calls us in strange way. As I started to fill in the shoes a little more, I felt a little more confident.

And I now have a Respect Life committee of seven people to support the diocesan ministry and help me prioritize and identify areas of concern in vicariates. A lot of times the problem is a lack of involvement where a parish has a Respect Life coordinator but no committee to back him or her up. You need a sounding board. You need heads to come together because everybody sees things in a different light and you get a bigger perspective.

This interview has been condensed and edited.