Your Catholic Neighbor: Melanie Pritchard
Educator helps teens be pro-life through chastity, modesty
By Joyce Coronel | January 15, 2009 | The Catholic Sun
Melanie Pritchard was grading papers one evening when the telephone rang. She couldn’t have known the call would take her life in a brand new direction.
The Our Lady of Mount Carmel parishioner was teaching education courses at Mesa Community College when someone phoned to tell her a friend was thinking about having an abortion.
“I tossed the papers aside and said, ‘How can I do this when I could be saving lives?’ I said, God, if it’s your will, if You want me to do pro-life full time, I’ll do it.’”
Ten minutes after offering her heartfelt prayer, Pritchard received another call. This time it was John Jakubczyk, president of the Life Education Corp., a sister organization to Arizona Right to Life. Jakubczyk offered Pritchard a job as the group’s education director.
With a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in curriculum instruction, Pritchard had already put in a few years teaching and was a natural for the role. She had also been active in the Life Teen youth group during high school and spent years working in youth ministry during and after college.
Her passion for the pro-life cause, however, dates back to seventh grade when she saw “The Silent Scream,” a movie that shows what happens to the unborn baby during an abortion.
“Every paper, every debate after that was about abortion,” Pritchard said.
But she didn’t just talk about her beliefs. In 2004 she founded The Underground Project, an organization to get young people involved in the effort to protect the unborn.
It was in her work in youth ministry, however, that Pritchard began to see the connection between fostering respect for the unborn and encouraging both chastity and healthy dating habits.
Pritchard had given several presentations to teens about the values of chastity and modesty. She realized that if teens could learn to embrace these virtues, they wouldn’t be getting themselves into situations where they were tempted to seek an abortion.
As part of her effort to encourage chastity, she founded the Refuge Clothing Company (refugeclothing.com). The hip but modest T-shirts the company sells, Pritchard said, are a unique way to promote the dignity of the human person.
It’s a dignity, she said, that can be compromised by the way most people are dating. A failure to live the virtue of chastity is a key factor in the abortion debacle, and Pritchard has traveled the country speaking at conferences on the theme.
“If you think about why young people are having premarital sex and getting themselves into these situations, it comes down to they don’t see their own value their own worth. How could you see the value in an unborn baby when you don’t see it in yourself?”
When it comes to dating, in fact, she has some pretty counter-cultural ideas — ideas she says she learned from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
Young people, Pritchard said, are rushing things instead of taking the right steps in dating.
“Normally what happens is I get a lot of young people crying because they have made a mistake. I have met thousands and thousands of people who have regretted having sex before marriage, but I have yet to meet one person who regretted waiting to have sex. And I know a lot who have waited,” Pritchard said.
Love, Pritchard tells young people, is all about the cross.
“How do we live love in our lives?” she asks them. “It’s the cross, the way of sacrifice. The cultural way is the selfish way.”
What’s your greatest aspiration or goal?
To be a really good mom, to be the best mom I can be so that my children grow up knowing that they’re loved. Every day I tell my son, “You are unrepeatable, irreplaceable and unique and the day you were born the world changed for the better.” I got that from Pope John Paul II and the Theology of the Body. It’s brilliant. If my children know their worth, they’ll be off to a really good start.
What’s your favorite quote?
“Be still and know that I am God,” because it forces me to go, OK, it’s not me, it’s God and be still and let Him work the way He works.
If you could meet one person…
Any teenager who is lonely and doesn’t know their worth, I’d love to sit down and have a conversation with them. Mother Teresa was a living saint in my lifetime and a great inspiration to me, too.
