Card for Day of Prayer
Catholic Weekly (22 June 2003) by Marilyn Rodriguez
Hannah Lorizio and Liam Travers, prayer card creators
Every child is the responsibility of everyone, says former NSW children's magistrate Barbara Holborow. She was thanking the children of St Mark's Primary School, Drummoyne, for taking on that responsibility by helping to create a prayer card that she launched at their school to promote a day of prayer for abused women and children.
The day of prayer, an initiative of the Catholic Womens' League Australia, is to promote awareness about and to pray for women and children here and overseas who are victims of violence and exploitation, especially trafficking and sexual slavery.
It is planned for July 6, the feast day of St Maria Goretti, a young girl who was killed by a neighbour when she rejected his sexual advances. Maree Triffett, the national social issues convenor of Catholic Women's League Australia, says it is estimated that a million children are victims of sexual slavery around the world.
It was her idea to create a card to encourage people to pray for them. Students at St Mark's - their parish priest is Mons Vince Redden, the chaplain for Catholic Women's League - were invited to enter a competition to create a card with a picture and a prayer for suffering children everywhere.
The younger students drew pictures and the older ones composed prayers.
The picture of a family, by eight-year-old Liam Travers and a prayer-poem by Hannah Lorizio, 10, were selected for the card.
Hannah's prayer was for children who are used by people "in ways not meant to be" and also for those who are "ragged and homeless and poor".
Barbara Holborow said she was "absolutely delighted" by the children's effort.
"It is beautiful because it is the work of the children," she said.
"It is not something that adults thought we should have, but something that kids thought up for other kids." She told the students at the school assembly launch: "The number of children who came before me in the court, not because they had committed a crime but because crime had been committed against them, led me to have many sleepless nights.
"And I believe that every child is the responsibility of everybody.
"You've taken up that responsibility with this prayer card and I think it is very special."
She said that she hoped to promote the card with the aim of getting it distributed through many schools, not only Catholic schools.
"I'm hoping that a lot of adults will take this card and read it and know that all these kids are praying for other kids and will also pray themselves for children who are in pain through abuse," she said.
Gladys Meany-Budd, the national secretary of Catholic Women's League Australia, said that the organisation is doing what it can to raise awareness of trafficking and sexual slavery at the local level.
"This prayer card is what we are doing at the moment, but we are always looking for a need or an opening for us to bring the problem more to people's attention."
The league had chosen to direct its attention to the problem after taking part in meetings of the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the Non-Government Organisations Committee in New York last year.
The prayer card will be distributed by the World Union of Catholic Women's Organisations, with which Catholic Women's League Australia is affiliated.
