By Anthony Barich
PERTH’S branch of the international True Love Waits movement is using its own 10th anniversary this year as a launching pad to breathe new life into it after a period of stagnation.
When Archbishop Barry Hickey offers Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Highgate at 2pm on 30 April to mark the anniversary, current leader Thomas Seeber hopes it will be the start of a new wave of interest for the movement which he believes is still as critical as ever, not only for the Church’s mission but for society at large.
True Love Waits started in Perth in February 2001 with a pledge ceremony by 14 youth in their early 20s at the Redemptorist Monastery in North Perth. Over 200 pledges have been taken since.
Key to its foundation was Redemptorist Fr Hugh Thomas and Grant Gorddard, Lydia Fernandez (now Stanley) and Clare Pike heading up a core youth leadership group who would go on to host over 50 presentations between 2001 and 2004, including in about 15 schools.
Its ‘open sessions’ at Highgate were hugely successful, where youth discussed real love, relationships, the virtue of chastity, sexuality, the dignity of the human person and testimonies of people living the chaste life, the joys and struggles, including those whose lives had been transformed by integrating their sexuality the way God intended.
They also covered related issues like modesty, natural family planning, abortion, pornography and self-mastery and sexually transmitted infections.
Now Tom, 32, a civil engineer married with a four-month-old daughter, wants the renewal to come from TLW’s core vision statement, which, as always, is to “know in our hearts and live in our lives the truth and meaning of sexuality and teach it to young people”.
Using Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body as its foundation, TLW aims to provide formation for a core team who are then enabled to provide catechesis to the wider community. “We back that up by being witnesses in our own lives, supporting each other in a community of like-minded people,” he said.
Tom now wants to drive TLW in a new direction – away from a centralised ministry at Highgate and into schools and parishes.
His 12-month plan is to find and form a key leadership group as Fr Thomas, Grant and Clare did in 2000; then, within five years, he wants TLW present in schools and parishes across the Archdiocese.
There is a unique opportunity, especially in Catholic schools, he said, as high school students are, like he was once, searching for the truth, but may not go to Mass or even believe in God.
But this renewal will take time. After the initial surge in 2000, later down the track Grant’s brother Stephen would pick up the leadership role, but now both brothers have entered St Charles’ Seminary to train for the priesthood, while Clare is Mother Superior of the new Religious association called the Missionaries of the Gospel.
Anthony Coyte, who now works at the John Paul II Insitute of Marriage and Family Studies in Melbourne, also did a considerable amount of work for True Love Waits, having presented at many schools and launched the organisation’s website.
Stephen worked virtually full-time for TLW in 2008, and drew over 80 youth to a Created and Redeemed DVD series over several weeks at Claremont parish.
The DVD series featured Christopher West, the US lay speaker who popularised Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body teaching on the fulfillment to be found in the Church’s teaching on sexuality for a new generation.
Though West recently returned from a self-imposed sabbatical, having been criticised and defended by respected conservative theologians on some parts of his interpretations of the late Pontiff’s teachings, “you can’t deny that he put Theology of the Body on the map, at least in the western world”, Tom told The Record.
West introduced Theology of the Body to TLW’s leaders in 2003 at a Perth forum hosted by The Record and attended by hundreds of youth, and Clare, Grant, Lydia Fernandez (now manager of Pregnancy Assistance) and Natalie Thomas went on to complete a two-week TOB intensive at the John Paul Institute for Marriage and Family Studies in Melbourne which became the foundation of their ministry.
Grant, Stephen and Lydia (now Stanley) have returned to help Tom rebuild the ministry with others, but, with a young family, Tom needs help.
John Paul II’s biographer, theologian George Weigel, called Theology of the Body a “ticking time bomb” that was just waiting to go off once people realised the beauty of the body of work that the late Pope called a detailed exposition of Pope Paul VI’s controversial 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (“on human life”).
The bomb certainly went off in Tom’s life. Since he made a conscious decision to be a Christian at 13 despite being a cradle Catholic, he struggled with one big question: why would God create such a wonderful thing like sex, only to put restraints on it?
No one – priests and laity alike – could give him a substantial explanation beyond pious platitudes, so he lived the alternative “worldly” lifestyle at university “almost as if to prove the Church wrong”, he said.
At age 27, after 15 years of searching for the Truth, he read West’s Introduction to Theology of the Body, and “the penny dropped”. His life was transformed and he set about reading everything he could on the subject.
He returned from World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney raring to find an outlet to promote this teaching about which he is so passionate.
To help Tom rebuild the TLW ministry, contact him on truelovewaitswa@yahoo.com or 0423 390 819