Jeopardy's Re-Run of the Washington "Power Players" show tonight highlighted The Sisters Of Life as second-place contestant (and some would say should have been winner) Peggy Noonan's charity, and that's the same group with whom our sometime co-blogger Theresa often works on offering post-abortion counseling services!

"The Sisters of Life offer you help - Before, During, and After your pregnancy." All confidentially, all for free, in the New York City and tristate area. At least they received $20,000 for Ms. Noonan's performance! ( I didn't know it was a re-run, oh, well!)

Other great news: these very same Sisters of Life will run the "Villa Maria Education Center" in North Stamford, CT, reopening it in October as the "Villa Maria Guadalupe* Retreat Center," now that the Knights of Columbus have bought it for just this purpose: to hold more retreats in their area for women who have had abortions and for pro-life activists.

The retreat house is in need of a new roof, some heating system upgrades, cleaning and other general repair, soooo, if ya know anyone who wants to help, call Theresa at 1-877-586-4621 or Sr. Mary Theresa directly at 718-881-8008!


* Trivia FYI, if anyone is interested: “Why is ‘Guadalupe’ in the new name?” Catholics believe that Mary, the Mother of God, physically appeared to a Mexican named Juan Diego in 1531, and left her image in brilliant colors on his tilma [a cloak made of cheap cactus-cloth; a tiny corner piece of the Lady’s garment image can be seen here; I’ve seen it personally] at a time when child sacrifice was practiced by the Aztecs out of fear that the gods were against them and that this would appease them. Within about a decade of this appearance of Mary, Mexico experienced an enormous conversion to Christianity and the child sacrifices ended.

As a result, Our Lady of Guadalupe is considered by Catholics to be the Patroness of the Unborn and of the Americas. The tilma should have disintegrated to nothing in a couple of decades but has no decay 483 years later and hasn’t been scientifically explained.

Doubt it'll ever be on "Jeopardy" but who knows!

Also in the image on the tilma, in the Lady’s eyes are mirrored reflections of four of the people who were in the room when the image was first seen, by the local Bishop and his priests, in 1531. Don’t take my word for it: from 1956 through 1979, six different doctors of ophthalmology examined this mirroring, called “Purkinje-Sanson images,” using direct examination and infra-red and other digitized image processing photos, concluding that “the original image is unexplainable as a human work.”