Pro-active youth to educate peers on the dignity of human life.
By Anthony Barich
A NSW pro-life movement has expanded to Victoria, with six Campion College students starting up Veritae Australia to mobilise support and educate young Australians on life issues from a logical standpoint.
Vitae Australia, which changed its name from Young Victorians for Life, started in June last year in Melbourne to “counteract the increasingly accepted infringement on the dignity of the human being”, will take a “multifaceted, empathetic approach” to promote Catholic understanding of the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception to natural death.
The group, which is already supported by a following of over 480 on social networking website Facebook, plans to promote a culture that supports and cares for the unborn, women hurt by abortion, women and families facing unexpected or challenging pregnancies, the infirm, the handicapped and the aged.
The group opposes the violence of abortion, foetal and embryonic experimentation, unethical reproductive technologies, infanticide, assisted suicide and euthanasia under any circumstances.
A group of six 17 to 20-year-old Campion College students met with Young Victorians for Life founder Matthew Restall in Sydney on August 31.
The new Sydney group plans to educate school students and youth groups and its own members to be informed, respectful and active promoters of its envisaged future through peaceful means. The group will start by running social events to attract youth, then form them with the knowledge they have gained from Campion College, Australia’s first Liberal Arts college that forms its students, both Catholic and non-Catholic, in humanities and sciences to understand the complementarity of faith and reason.
Emily Dunn, 19, one of the six founding Veritae members in Sydney, said the group, which will meet weekly, plans to build its brand by extending its membership to other denominations and religious and the non-religious by appealing to reason.
She said that their formation and Campion prepared them for this task through the fraternity and support of like-minded people and taught them to use their words carefully.
The movement is open to expansion in any other state around Australia.