Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

Busy updating some materials so I thought I would post a reprint of an article about Lumina from the NCR

A Light on the Path

by JOSEPH PRONECHEN, Register Correspondent – October 2009

It was while working with Good Counsel crisis-pregnancy homes that Christopher Bell — founder of Good Counsel — spotted another pressing need: He saw post-abortive parents who were hurting. They needed help, hope and healing.

In 2001, to meet this need, he launched a Good Counsel program called Lumina. Seven years ago he named Theresa Bonopartis Lumina’s director. She is also co-developer of the Entering Canaan post-abortion ministry with the Sisters of Life. She recognized that abortion hurts not only the woman, but anyone connected with it in any way. There’s even a program in the works for siblings of aborted children.

“There’s a dead baby and a ton of people wounded by it, as well,” says Bonopartis plainly.

Lumina, which is located in the Bronx but receives calls from all over the country, serves as a post-abortion referral network linking people to various post-abortion ministries, counselors and priests. It also runs retreats and group sessions. Lumina trains and educates, too.

Three years ago Lumina began groups for men. In mixed groups, men don’t share as openly with women as they do with other men, according to Bonopartis and Lumina’s longtime spiritual director, speaker and confessor for days of healing, Father Mariusz Koch of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.