Our History

The Catholic Pro-Life Community was commissioned by Bishop Charles Grahmann under the founding leadership of Executive Director Emeritus Karen Garnett in February 1993. Today it continues under the diocesan leadership of Bishop Edward Burns and currently-serving Interim Executive Director Jeff Schiefelbein. What began as a small group of volunteers has grown into a comprehensive set of individual ministries, with over 35 full-time and part-time employees, hundreds of volunteers, and a pro-life outreach to thousands of North Texans. The CPLC has been called the largest and most effective diocesan pro-life organization in the world, and a model for the nation.

Under the guidance of the U.S. Bishops’ Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, the CPLC’s ministries cover a comprehensive range of pro-life work, from post-abortion healing to parish coordination, from civic action to youth education, from starting the first full-time Hispanic pro-life ministry to mentoring and supporting young mothers who are pregnant and in need of help. The CPLC was the first diocesan respect life ministry to hire and train staff sidewalk counselors. Since 1990, the number of abortion centers in Dallas has fallen from 13 to four, including a newly opened chemical abortion facility in McKinney. More than 10,000 mothers have chosen life since 1997. The CPLC’s summer intern program, training high school and college students in sidewalk counseling, has led to the additional training of more than 700 college students at Franciscan University, the University of Notre Dame, and Benedictine College and the formation of a national sidewalk-counseling-training model by one of its intern graduates.

 

The Catholic Church is Pro-Life

"Human life is sacred and inviolable at every moment of existence, including the initial phase which precedes birth. All human beings, from their mothers' womb, belong to God, who searches them and knows them, who forms them and knits them together with his own hands, who gazes on them when they are tiny shapeless embryos and already sees in them the adults of tomorrow whose days are numbered and whose vocation is even now written in the "book of life." There too, when they are still in their mothers' womb – as many passages of the Bible bear witness – they are the personal objects of God's loving and fatherly providence."

— Evangelium Vitae, n. 61b