On this First Sunday of Advent, I make a second appeal for help for a family in need. In this appeal, however, we have received the consent of Tony and Ann Crowe of Ireland to reveal their identity. In this appeal, we tell more specifically why we identify with them so personally, and in this appeal we tell more of our own experience of poverty that it pleased God to give to us as we embarked on our first attempts at The Leaven, a fund to honor those who honor God by accepting the teachings of Humanae Vitae. I beg your patience in reading it, as it may well help you to discern for yourself if the appeal is legitimate, and also if God is calling you to be leaven in this particular way in this Advent season of repentance and almsgiving. I am overjoyed that the Holy Spirit is giving me these words on this particular day, as without Him, I am well aware I would have no words to write.
Our first appeal resulted in contributions of $775 from four contributors. While this is a good start, we have quite a way to go towards the approximate three to five thousand needed to avert a serious long-term financial crisis for a worthy family. We know their potential plight by our own firsthand experience, and it is our great hope to help them by sharing more details of a time of great darkness and recent recovery with you, appealing to your generosity.
Within a year after we started The Leaven (June of 1987), we lost everything. Alton had been working as a construction manager for a small, privately-owned oil construction company for about seven years, and when that company dissolved, there went the job that had allowed me to stay home to be a full time mother to our five children, a role I had come to cherish after about six years of classroom teaching and not being at home alternating intermittently through the span of over fifteen years as we had our five children. The loss of income during the Recession of the Eighties, with the collapse of oil prices, began our own plunge into poverty and all the psychological, emotional, spiritual and temporal struggle that kind of devastation brings with it.
Though the request of the Lord was something that came to me in prayer, it coincided with a time when Alton was becoming more acutely aware of his own role as 'father' after reading a book recommended by our spiritual director. As he described it, that book "gripped me by the neck for three days," and after reading it, he wanted to be very closely involved in the family. Till then, he was a good father, but he was leaning more and more into what seemed to me to be a workaholic at the same time. I was thankful that the book changed him almost overnight.
The change softened Alton in many ways, and one effect was that it caused him to be open to my prayer experience. When the company for which he worked went out of business, we thought it must mean God wanted us to work, not part time, but full time, in an apostolate to promote Humanae Vitae through The Leaven. We pulled out all the stops , including any and all available financial resources, and put ourselves wholeheartedly into following what we, in discernment with leaders in the Archdiocese of San Antonio, thought was God's will.
We had no idea how we could bless others financially, since we ourselves were not wealthy, so we thought maybe we were meant to give retreats that would lead people to truth, and they would be so eager and grateful to hear it, that they would then be contributors to the "fund to honor those who honor Me by accepting the teaching of Humanae Vitae," as Jesus had asked, along with His request that it be called 'The Leaven.' Naively, I figured if people just heard the words, it would cause them to re-think Humanae Vitae or to investigate it maybe for the first time.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Instead, what we found in the year that we officially began, despite the blessing of our archbishop, who directed us to work with the Family Life Office, was that people did not want to hear what we had to say, and when they heard we were going to talk about birth control, aka natural family planning, in general they fled from us like we had a plague. Since we had discerned with the Church rather than presuming the message really was from Jesus without that discernment, we stepped out, or rather, leapt out, in faith, abandoning ourselves to God's Providence.
Little did we know that we were about to be plunged into a long darkness that was to shake us to the core about some very important realities: our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. Little did we know that that darkness would last for over twenty years. Little did we know that it included at least one, possibly more, "silent" abortions caused by abortifacient Pill and IUD. Little did we know that we were about to become one of the very families that The Leaven is intended to help: a family that embraces the teaching of Humanae Vitae, welcomes a number of children, and then experiences devastating circumstances that assault their very ability to provide.
Within that first year, we lost everything material, starting with a just-paid-off new cornet that we had purchased for Neal, our second son, when it was stolen from the band hall and taken out into a field and smashed by a delinquent student. From there, things only became more serious. The company Alton worked for folded, and he lost his job and the company pick-up that went with it. Within months, we lost our home, and since we had been rooted in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament and in discernment with reputable religious in coming to the decision to do The Leaven, we were thrown into great confusion and fear about hearing the voice of God and also about each other. Worse than any other loss was the loss of trust we began to have that we could really communicate with God and along with that, a growing mistrust of each other that brought us eventually to the very brink of separation, if not divorce in 2005, slightly over twenty years after hearing the request for a fund through a surprise prayer experience shortly after I went to bed one night in 1984, but before I fell asleep.
The experience was tied to our involvement with a couple sent to us for help regarding the birth of twins, with both husband and wife being unemployed, deaf and mute, and with one very healthy little girl already. It resulted in a second "meeting" with Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, founder of Human Life International by way of a letter of complaint that I wrote to him asking what could be done about the sterilization a doctor performed on the young mother without her or her husband's knowledge or consent. In his reply, he said that this sort of thing happens all the time among the poor and the handicapped.
What could all this failure mean, then? We knew it couldn't mean that Humanae Vitae was wrong, that it really wasn't something God wanted others to accept after all, so He didn't support such an apostolate. What else could it mean? I wondered over and over if I was so hungry to be 'somebody' that I was so given to grandiosity and vanity that I would plunge my own children in harm's way of eventually rejecting the Church because of the example of a mentally sick mother? Was Alton weak instead of manly in yielding to his wife's insights? Should he have ignored me instead of listening closely, entering into the discerning process with me? Would some or all of our children lose their faith because of us? And lastly, would we lose our own marriage in the end, a laughingstock of an example of a traditional married couple, a mockery of marriage instead of a witness to its being an authentic sacrament, blessed by God?
Though it took many years, what we discovered was the abortion or abortions that we had never acknowledged as a result of the contraception use in the early Seventies. Through a series of events, I allowed the memory of an "odd period" to resurface, and with that, healing began to occur very rapidly, along with a growing desire to resume The Leaven. Alton and I each made a retreat through Rachel's Vineyard, and these retreats marked such a dramatic change in our relationship with God and with each other that we could do nothing other than realize that the unacknowledged, unrepented "silent" abortions were the stumbling block that screamed relentlessly for justice and then healing all along.
We had repented of contraception use long, long ago, but there was still the necessary work of acknowledging that with the contraception was also the termination of human life whose blood cried out to God. In my bible, next to Jeremiah 2:33-35, I wrote, "July 3, 1987," less than a month after beginning The Leaven, though my interpretation written in the margins had nothing at all to do with abortion then. Yet, I continued, from time to time, to have a sense of those words being applied to me, especially after The Leaven turned out to be such a miserable failure. Eventually, my sense of conviction was so profound that I told my spiritual director about it, and his response was that I had taken a "quantum leap" that day, though, he, too, said he didn't know how. These haunting, prophetic words from the NAB were:
How well you pick your way when seeking love!
You, who in your wickedness, have gone by ways unclean!
You, on whose clothing there is the life-blood of the innocent,
whom you found committing no burglary:
Yet withal you say, "I am innocent; at least, his anger is
turned away from me."
Behold! I will judge you on that word of yours, "I have not sinned."
How they applied began to be revealed to me in 1998, though I didn't recognize the extent until I came across an article on the website of The Edith Stein Foundation some time in 2005, a correction from prior testimony that I make upon finding an e-mail to Founder Dr. Dominic Pedulla. In March of 2009, I finally made a Rachel's Vineyard retreat. In the summer, Alton also made one, for healing from abortion by birth control. In June of 2009, I gave my testimony before a local chapter of Magnificat. On October 7, Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, my testimony aired on EWTN's Women of Grace program, hosted by Johnnette Benkovic.
Shortly after that testimony, I was contacted by the wife of the Executive Director of Human Life International Ireland, Therese McCrystal. Could The Leaven help a family in distress whose story was being recorded one day prior to mine when I went to Birmingham in June to do the pre-recorded program? The father, Tony Crowe, was a guest with Patrick McCrystal on Women of Grace, and he told his own story of his and his wife Ann's use of the Pill and the negative impact of that from a man's perspective. Once again, here was the connection, perhaps this time from Heaven, between Fr. Paul Marx and The Leaven, and that connection was coming all the way from Ireland: a request to honor a family who is now honoring God by accepting the teaching of Humanae Vitae.
Alton and I were amazed, because for the first time in over thirty years due to a sudden successful month of a business started several years ago, we were actually personally financially able to help to a degree never possible in the past thirty plus years. Our help, however, is nothing near the amount actually needed by the Crowe family to help them to avoid the possible result of devastating poverty that we experienced ourselves.
Knowing that, we put out a second, more urgent request for your help. With the first appeal, four contributors blessed The Crowe Family with a total of $775, but this is nowhere near what they need to get them through their current crisis, not to mention what they need for Christmas gifts for their eight children, all under the age of thirteen.
So, once again, as we begin the penetential season of Advent, I write a second appeal, begging for your help for this family, whose identity I now make know to you. You can hear Tony Crowe's testimony at www.tlhv.org/testimonies.Conclude for yourself if he is genuine. I've checked the priest references he provided, and if you wish, you can contact them as well if you write to me for their phone numbers.
What I write next will be very, very difficult for some of you to read, but I write it with urgent prayers, begging God to come to your assistance in whatever way you need it most as I am confident He desire mercy and healing for all of his children regarding human sexuality. He knows full well the attack His children are under, and He has promised to provide the way of escape. He has certainly provided it for us, personally!
I beg you, if you have ever used contraception in any form that could have been abortifacient, or if you are permanently sterilized and have prevented the births of children God may have intended through your union, first and foremost, take this to God and beg Him for healing. Actively seek the healing you may need for possible unrecognized abortion you may have participated in, unwittingly or not. It simply doesn't matter how tiny that tiny human being may have been, it was still a human life, a human life who can still be acknowledged and even given meaning to help others not to be aborted through the voices of their own beloved parents. Our children are safe with God, but we must still love them, still acknowledge them, still give them meaning through our witness.
Secondly, consider being a leaven to warn the culture by making a contribution to the Crowes as one means of atonement for acts that are so counter to what God intends for marriage and family life. Together, we can heal the culture by acknowledging the seriousness of the injury to God and to human life that contraception truly is. I beg you to just try God in this, even if you have long ago confessed contraceptive use and have turned away from it, as we did. Help to heal the culture by giving assistance to this couple who is willing to testify openly and humbly through their own journey of sin, repentance, and healing.
Add your own voice as a leaven of repentance and atonement to theirs and to ours to be one voice of thanksgiving for God's healing and mercy, which as we discovered, is also rooted in justice commensurate with the serious nature of the offense.
Of course, we welcome assistance by those who have not gone against God by way of contraception or sterilization as well. We pray for God's great blessings upon all benefactors, as we trust that God knows the true needs of all and that He will not abandon those who honor Him, however late, by accepting the teaching of Humanae Vitae.
Pray to know the contribution He wills for you this Advent.Donations may be made by check or online at www.tlhv.org/our_projects/tony_and_ann_crowe.
May your hearts be ever merry! (Ps. 22)
Juliana.
I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a 'transformer' in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader. - Stephen Covey
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