“I skipped out of the confessional.”

For 29 years, Veronica (I’ve changed her name to protect her privacy) had avoided the Church and lived in “constant fear,” as she describes it, “that my secret would get out and the people I loved the most would be hurt the most.”

She had had two abortions. The first was at age 18.

For 29 years, the open wound of those abortions affected every one of her relationships. “I felt like I was the only woman who had an abortion who felt so alone and isolated.”

Our culture — and our politics — does give women that impression. It’s a choice, an exercise of freedom, sometimes necessary if one wants to have a career or continue a relationship. All these things are lies — especially the impression that there are no long-term consequences, that such an intimate violence would have no effect on one’s life.

Veronica, influenced by her current husband’s religious awakening, felt a tremendous need to confess her abortions. Previously, she had had no idea how she would ever manage to tell a priest about what she had done. When she finally did, she was met with loving forgiveness. And he told her about a group that helps women and men with healing after abortion. You need healing, he had told her, urging her to seek out the Sisters of Life, which she would eventually do.

“The sisters were so gentle and so joyful,” she recalled during recent testimony to a pro-life commission that advises Cardinal Timothy Dolan in New York. The Sisters welcomed her and other women to a healing retreat, where forgiveness could be offered without judgment.

This is the side of the pro-life movement that isn’t often in the headlines, not unless a major presidential candidate puts his foot in his mouth. And so it was, when Donald Trump, betraying an unfamiliarity with the ministries and attitudes and heart of the pro-life movement, bought into and fed the caricature of the harsh anti-abortion right when he told Chris Matthews that he would advocate punishment for women who had abortions, a comment he later walked back.

Trump could afford women like the Sisters of Life. When then-New York Archbishop John O’Connor helped found the group 25 years ago, he made a pledge that anyone who needed help could come to the Church and be met with aid and mercy.

O’Connor helped found the Sisters of Life so that men and women who felt like their lives had ended with the abortion of their children would come to know better. He wanted them to be healed. He wanted them to know of the love of their creator, for them to have an opportunity to develop a relationship with him and with the children missing in their lives.

For women like Veronica, it was a chance for transformation. “Your life has not ended,” is what the Sisters of Life tell women and men damaged by abortion. And these men and women come to trust themselves and their children to the merciful hand of God.

I spent Holy Saturday with the Sisters of Life, during one of the rare times when they are not out and about, healing wounds and saving lives. This day, they were in complete silence, encountering the love of a God who would willingly die on a cross for the salvation of man. For the likes of the Sisters of Life, hope is not strategy but the answer to every question. If Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or anyone else encountered them, he and she and our politics might never be the same. They certainly wouldn’t be as painful.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online and founding director of Catholic Voices USA. She can be contacted at [email protected].

COPYRIGHT 2016 United Feature Syndicate