Faith in action by Father Ted Colleton Scholarship winner
Youthful exuberance for an important cause can run high initially, but often times the passion quickly dissipate as life’s distractions appear. We have come across an inspiring story where a pro-life student put her money where her mouth is, in dramatic fashion.
Much has been written in pro-life media about the October 4th arrest of five Carleton University students for displaying the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) on their university grounds. GAP uses large, graphic photo boards of aborted children to draw comparisons between abortion and the holocaust. The focus of this U of Carleton story has been on the bravery of the pro-life students and on the Stalin-like suppression of free speech practiced by university administration.
A small but interesting detail has surfaced about one of the arrested students, Zuza Kurzawa, which had not been previously noticed.
Kurzawa was actually a 2009 winner of the Father Ted Colleton Scholarship, a pro-life award. The scholarship is an annual award administered by THE INTERIM, Canada’s pro-life newspaper. Each year, the paper runs a pro-life essay contest through Catholic high schools across Canada. The authors of the top three essays win cash prizes up to $1,500.
Zuza’s essay submission while at St. Therese of Lisieux High School in Richmond Hill, ON made her a co-winner in 2009. Her pro-life essay was called “The Cure”, and its theme was “spiritual starvation” as the source of pro-abortion views in our society.
Dan DiRocco who runs the Fr. Ted Colleton Scholarship essay contest for The Interim, read about the student arrests and thought Kurzawas’s name was familiar. Out of curiosity, he checked the records and verified she was indeed a past winner.
“We’re so pleased to see that high school students who participate in the pro-life essay contest are literally putting their pro-life beliefs into action after they move onto university”, said DiRocco about Zuza. “Congratulations to Zuza for living her faith”.
Students interested in entering the 2010/2011 contest can look for this year’s theme by clicking here. The deadline for essay submissions is November 30, 2010.