Respect Life Award recipient is ‘non-stop advocate and warrior for pro-life cause’
Sheryl Dye receives this year’s archdiocesan Archbishop Edward T. O’Meara Respect Life Award from Father C. Ryan McCarthy, spiritual director for Bishop Simon Bruté College Seminary in Indianapolis, at the end of a Mass at SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Indianapolis on Oct. 4, Respect Life Sunday. (Photo by Natalie Hoefer)
By Natalie Hoefer
Sheryl Dye admits to not always having a pro-life mindset in the past.
“I wouldn’t have an abortion, but I thought it was a woman’s right,” says the former Sanctity of Life committee chair at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Indianapolis.
“It wasn’t until I started seeing some of the radical things that people were wanting to do that I started to question that way of thinking. And then I started to really look at the sanctity of life, that that’s a human being in there.
“And the more I looked at what people were wanting to do, the more I thought, I have to do something to stop this.”
Since that revelation 20 years ago, Dye has worked to end abortion and change hearts to embrace the sanctity of life within the womb.
She was honored for her efforts on Oct. 4—the first Sunday of October, which the Church in the U.S. celebrates annually as Respect Life Sunday. At the end of a Mass that day at SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Indianapolis, Dye received the archdiocese’s Archbishop Edward T. O’Meara Respect Life Award. Her story follows below.
More than 30 seminarians of Bishop Simon Bruté College Seminary in Indianapolis were among those worshiping at the Mass. The seminary’s spiritual director, Father C. Ryan McCarthy, celebrated the Mass.
He began his homily by addressing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ theme for Respect Life Sunday this year: “Mary, the Mother of Life.”
Seek ‘unmediated experience’ of others
“What does it mean that Mary is the mother of life?” Father McCarthy asked.
For one, he said, she is “the mother of God, the mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is … the way, the truth, and the life, quite literally … [since she is] the source of the Incarnation.
“And from the Incarnation we receive the sacraments. … So, Mary allows us to celebrate the goodness of life in coming in direct contact with God in the Holy Eucharist.”
Respect for life involves relationship, said Father McCarthy, and relationship involves “a commitment to the other and a willingness to be in their presence.”
Praying for others is essential, he noted. But praying “with them” and having “an interpersonal relationship with them,” when possible, shows a particular respect for life.
“For us, as Christians, it’s important that we reach out as best we can to other human persons and have personal relationships with them,” Father McCarthy said. “So, talk to people, respect their life, see their person—their actual person.”
He encouraged the congregation to “make the effort to go to someone and be with them personally … . Support the poor and those who are in need, and do this as personally as you can.”
The same holds true for visiting the elderly in nursing homes that “oftentimes become storage facilities for those who are inconvenient to our lives.”
Participation in prison ministry is another way to be physically present to those “who are lonely and who are isolated and feel particularly unloved,” Father McCarthy said. And if such ministry is not an option, he suggested researching organized “pen-pal” programs.
“We respect life by loving others in a very personal way,” he concluded.
“And so, I’d encourage you to look at your life and figure out how you can do just that. How you can do what our Lord Jesus Christ did, which is … to remove the obstacles to an incarnational, unmediated experience of the other so that they could know and love God and experience God in this life and be with him in the next.”
At the end of the Mass, Father McCarthy presented the Respect Life award to Dye.
A ‘passionate’ advocate for life
Dye was selected from among the nominations submitted to the archdiocesan Office of Human Life and Dignity. Brie Anne Varick, director of the office, shared comments about this year’s recipient at the end of the Mass.
“Sheryl is passionate about advocating for the human person at every stage of life,” said Varick. “She has embraced the Church’s mission to uphold the dignity of the human person from conception to natural death and has enthusiastically put countless hours into this mission.”
In his nomination letter for Dye, St. John the Evangelist pastor Father Timothy Wyciskalla wrote that, through her roughly 12 years of leadership, the parish’s Sanctity of Life committee “flourished, and St. John’s has become a very strong pro-life parish.”
His list of Dye’s accomplishments at the parish is long. Among them are the creation of a spiritual adoption program, a miscarriage ministry, a program to pray for specific pregnant moms and a pro-life film and speaker series offered in partnership with Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish in Indianapolis.
“And we’re now a Gabriel Project parish!” Father Wyciskalla added. “Sheryl is a true, non-stop advocate and warrior for the pro-life cause.”
Outside of her parish, Dye has helped coordinate vendor booths for the Youth Rally prior to the annual Indiana March for Life in January, Varick added.
She also noted Dye’s “many years” as a sidewalk counselor, “standing outside of abortion clinics praying and counseling women who are considering abortion, as well as training those called to join the ministry of sidewalk counseling.”
Her efforts to train and organize these “peaceful, loving, law-abiding” volunteers began about the same time Dye became head of St. John the Evangelist’s pro-life committee.
It was part of her plan when the Dye family moved to Indianapolis from Westfield, Ind., 13 years ago.
‘Somebody has to speak up’
Dye had her pro-life conversion seven years prior to the move when she was a member of St. Maria Goretti Parish in Westfield in the Lafayette Diocese.
“I got involved just kind of mildly,” she says, including participating in and coordinating the area’s local 40 Days for Life prayer campaigns in front of abortion facilities.
That involvement introduced her to sidewalk counseling ministry.
“So many people think that pro-lifers are just about the babies,” says Dye. “But really for me, it was seeing the hurt in women that I had started to meet and to talk to and wanting to help them know there’s so much help in Indianapolis, that there’s people who will walk with them the whole way.
“Abortion is seen as, ‘This will take care of my problem,’ but it just adds a lifetime of problem. So, we can work together through whatever issue it is that makes them think abortion is the answer.”
After the move from Westfield, Dye started an Indianapolis location of Sidewalk Advocates for Life. The non-profit organization’s mission is to “train, equip, and support communities across the United States and the world in sidewalk advocacy: to be the hands and feet of Christ, offering loving, life-affirming alternatives to all present at abortion and abortion-referral facilities, thereby eliminating demand and ending abortion.”
Dye emphasizes the part about abortion-referral facilities.
“Because Indiana has [a near-total] abortion ban, people think that it’s no longer an issue here, and I get asked often why we’re still out there” at the Planned Parenthood center in Indianapolis where abortions previously occurred and which now offers abortion referrals.
“We’re still out there because even though Indiana banned [most] abortion, we know that about 9,000 women still went out of state or had an in-home abortion using pills” last year, Dye says. “So, the need isn’t gone.
“And women are still coming into Planned Parenthood, getting pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, and Planned Parenthood isn’t helping them through their pregnancy. Planned Parenthood is telling them where they can go across the state line.”
Sidewalk counselors share with these women where they can get life-affirming care.
“It’s very peaceful, loving, and we follow all laws,” Dye explains. “When the cars come in the drive [of the Indianapolis Planned Parenthood facility], we wave at them, hope that they’ll stop, and if they do, we just talk to them about the help that’s available right next door at the Women’s Care Center or through Gabriel Project.”
She offers sidewalk counselor training periodically.
“We still need a lot of help” to cover every hour of the facility’s 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday schedule, she says.
As for her Respect Life award, Dye says she was “very shocked and touched” to receive it.
“I’m a very small cog in the pro-life wheel,” she says. “It’s just become a passion that somebody has to speak up for these people who have no voice and who society says someone else is to determine their value. We have to speak out against that.”
(For more information on the archdiocesan Office of Human Life and Dignity, go to archindy.org/human-life-and-dignity or contact Brie Anne Varick at bvarick@archindy.org or 317-236-1543. For more information on sidewalk counseling or shadowing to gauge interest, contact Sheryl Dye at smdye1@gmail.com.) †
