Has anybody noticed that Trinity no longer has a club that supports Amnesty International? Does anybody know why AI was suddenly canned after 10 years at Trinity? Recently, I set out to answer these questions.

Amnesty International is a worldwide organization with 2.2 million members who work to free those who are falsely imprisoned, abolish the death penalty, stop violence against women, and ensure that every person enjoys full human rights. So any reasonable person would assume that this organization would have the support of the Catholic Church, right? Not so fast.

From its beginning, AI was officially neutral on the issue of abortion, but in 2007 AI adopted a new policy urging governments to ensure access to abortion services for women in the case of rape, incest or when pregnancy puts the mother’s health at risk. Soon after this change, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, announced that the Catholic Church would immediately end its financial contributions to AI.

So what does this have to do with Trinity no longer offering an AI club? "Being officially aligned with Amnesty International would not work with us (Trinity) being a Catholic institution," school President Dr. Rob Mullen said. But I am left to wonder why everything in the Catholic Church is always black or white? Common sense tells me that "life" includes gray areas that Rome simply refuses to acknowledge.

Trinity’s affiliation with AI began in 1997, and club members worked solely on AI’s letter writing campaigns that were dedicated to securing the release of falsely imprisoned people around the world.

Twice a month the club would receive urgent updates describing a specific prisoner, and students would write letters demanding their release. Because of this worldwide grassroots operation, people holding these prisoners would receive millions of letters from around the world calling attention to their actions.

"The good thing about these letter writing campaigns was that they were not based on hearsay; AI well-researched each case," said Trinity teacher Mr. Tom Dubay, moderator of Trinity’s old AI group. "When we had AI here, we would write on the behalf of about 25 people a year, and the success rate of these campaigns was about 60 percent."

With these facts in mind, it seems sacrilegious that a Catholic school should be forced to abandon an organization that does so much good around the world.

So, I propose this solution; the previous letter writing campaign be picked up again within Trinity’s newest club, Students For Life.

This practical decision would allow the school to maintain its disassociation from AI while the students could renew their crusade of cooperation to help reduce the injustices in the world.