Accepting an invitation from Dominican Vice President of Catholic Identity Mrs. Jill Cabes (’87) to be a guest speaker, attorney Dorinda Chiappetta Bordlee (’83) returned to her alma mater where she addressed Ms. Anne Comiskey’s Civics and Government AP classes.

Mrs. Bordlee is Vice President, co-founder, and chief counsel of the Bioethics Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal organization whose mission is to put law in the service of life. She spoke to the classes about difficult topics facing Catholics in a world growing increasingly more and more secular. The topics included life issues of abortion and its negative impact on women, human cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. Mrs. Bordlee stressed the importance for the students to educate themselves and form their consciences early in life. The class was also informed of individual rights according to the Constitution and were given a practical lesson in federalism, the division of local, state, and federal governments.

Ms. Comiskey said when her students turned in their Current Events assignments, she found a lack of understanding of news stories covering religious liberty. “One of my ultimate goals as a Civics teacher at Dominican is for my students to illuminate God’s love. Our goal in Catholic education is to ‘speak the truth, Veritas, in love,’ as Dorinda told them many times,” shared Ms. Comiskey.

Mrs. Bordlee emphasized that all humans are “made to love and to be loved … We have to ask ourselves are we truly loving the other person when it comes to decision-making in certain issues.”