The Wound No One Names: Post-Abortion Healing and the Work of Project Rachel

Some wounds announce themselves. This one hides. In this short course, Fr. Charles Sikorsky, President of Divine Mercy University, interviews Mary McCloskey of the U.S. Bishops’ Pro-Life Secretariat about Project Rachel, the Catholic Church’s abortion-healing ministry — and about the people, common and near, who carry this injury in silence. McCloskey lays out the “three-legged stool” of sin, grief, and trauma that makes post-abortion healing a whole-person task, names the reality of coerced abortion and moral injury, and describes the disposition healing begins with: an “attitude of leisure and listening” that gives a person permission to speak a wound they may have repressed for decades.

The lesson turns that interview into working guidance for the helping professional. You will learn why an authentically Catholic response treats the spiritual and the psychological as partners rather than competitors, why proving a client’s guilt is smaller than they fear rarely sets them free, and what the counselor’s unique position — being “not the priest” — makes possible. It is a one-lesson course you can finish in about an hour, with graduate-level depth beneath a plain-spoken surface.