Our Mission & Vision

“By His Wounds You Have Been Healed” - 1 Peter 2:24

Mission

Vision

History

Heart Symbol

Our mission is to help young adults and adults with divorced and separated parents give voice to their pain and find transformative healing in Christ. We do this as a Catholic, peer-led ministry by providing unique programs and means for Christ to transform their life-draining wounds into life-giving resources of faith, hope, love, and joy for themselves, their relationships, and the Church. We also seek to help them make and sustain a life-long gift of love in either the vocation of marriage or consecrated life.

We accomplish this work of spiritual healing through establishing peer-led diocesan, college campus, and parish retreat ministries and support groups through local, Life-Giving Wounds chapters. We also provide online ministry and outreach (FB + IG), print resources and online resources for healing, and presentations, leader trainings, and consultations.

We also seek to connect adult children of divorce and separation to married mentor couples, psychological counseling, and spiritual direction.

If this is something you need in your life, then start discovering more here or here and connect with us on social media. If this is a mission you want to support, then please consider getting involved or giving (we are a 501(c)3 charitable organization).

1. Make the spiritual healing of young adults and adults from divorced or separated families of origin a pastoral priority. Currently, ministry to adult children of divorce and separation is a glaring pastoral need in the Catholic Church. Very little dedicated outreach or pastoral care exists for adults whose parents are divorced or separated, despite well-established evidence that the break-up of one’s parents can cause deep, lasting wounds that affect a person’s well-being on multiple levels. These men and women deserve the Church’s comfort, assistance, and love, not silence and avoidance. Life-Giving Wounds has the programs and vision that can help bring healing to these precious sons and daughters of God.

2. Establish the Life-Giving Wounds retreat ministry and support groups in every Catholic diocese. The nationwide presence of a dedicated retreat for adult children of divorce or separation, and follow-up support groups, will offer life-giving Catholic community for adult children of divorce or separation, and will help remedy the glaring pastoral need referenced above. Dioceses, parishes, and colleges can all be home bases for this ministry.

3. Re-engage those who feel forgotten by the Church. It’s not uncommon for adult children of divorce – especially young adults – to abandon their faith or distance themselves from the Church in part because they feel the Church has been too silent about their wounds and hasn’t helped them enough. (For example, see “How Decades of Divorce Helped Erode Religion” in the Washington Post.) Life-Giving Wounds provides an invitation back to the Church by sharing the Father’s look of love and a practical way forward to deeper healing.

4. Strengthen marriages and families by healing wounds that can lead to relationship-harming beliefs and behaviors. Statistically, adult children of divorce are more likely themselves to divorce; we want to change that. Discovering God’s deep healing impacts not only individuals but also whole families and future generations. Our groundbreaking Perfect Love Casts Out Fear project will develop online course targeting young adults from broken homes, and we’ll strategically partner with existing marriage mentorship networks to connect individuals, especially young adults and engaged couples, to mentor couples so that they can receive authentic witnesses of inspiring, faith-filled marriages.

5. Cultivate evangelizing missionary disciples by inviting participants to share in our work. Adult children of divorce or separation who have found healing are tremendous witnesses to love in suffering and uniquely helpful to others on the same path. By proactively inviting some past participants to become leaders in their dioceses and parishes, in collaboration with local leaders, we hope to grow local ministries and provide witnesses to God’s healing power and love. (Our volunteer team of 70+ are largely LGW alumni!)

6. Revitalize parishes by equipping them to be a place of healing for adults from divorced and separated families of origin, who in turn will evangelize and welcome others from similar backgrounds. Healing is attractive to others, and parishes that meet these needs will have many individuals able to witness, befriend, and support others on their pathway of spiritual healing.  

The Life-Giving Wounds ministry grew out of the efforts and passion of many people. Above all, our work is the result of the initiative of the Holy Spirit, thanks be to God!

The inspiration for Life-Giving Wounds originally came from a research project called Recovering Origins, created by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Washington, D.C. Dr. Daniel Meola – founder and director of Life-Giving Wounds with his wife Bethany – was a student at the John Paul II Institute at that time, and he was grateful to play a sizeable role in the development of the Recovering Origins materials.

In 2015, Daniel began working at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C., where he adapted the Recovering Origins program into a three-day retreat he created and piloted it as such.

In 2017, Daniel presented a workshop about healing the wounds of adult children of divorce and separation at the annual conference of the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers (NACFLM). After this talk and the positive feedback from diocesan family life directors, it was clear that there was a tremendous need for pastoral programs to adult children of divorce to spread nationwide. There was no program in existence to meet the specific needs of now-adult children of divorce or separation. To facilitate this goal, diocesan family life directors suggested forming a team dedicated to spreading the retreat and training leaders in this ministry. Therefore, in 2018, Daniel formed the Life-Giving Wounds retreat team to spread ministry to young adults and adults from divorced and broken homes nationwide, with the three-day healing retreat as its centerpiece. In addition to ongoing retreats in the Archdiocese of Washington, the retreat team traveled in 2018 and 2019 to Arlington, St. Augustine, and New York. In 2020 we became an official 501(c)3 non-profit, developed a store with our own retreat materials, and pivoted toward developing our online ministry and outreach to hundreds of people across the country during Covid-19.

As the retreat ministry began to grow and spread, and the retreat team received feedback from retreat participants, Life-Giving Wounds developed and expanded the retreat content far beyond what was originally included in the Recovering Origins materials. So, to reflect this development and respond to participants’ needs, we created our own original content for a Life-Giving Wounds retreat (under our own name), support group curriculum, a one-of-a-kind blog for further healing resources, a comprehensive leader’s guide, leadership training, online community and outreach through our social media channels, and so much more to assist local leaders to effectively carry out ministry to young adults and adults from broken homes. We also have continued expanding to new chapters and produced a full-length book that can serve as a guide for healing.

Looking to the future, we hope to continue expanding the Life-Giving Wounds ministry. We also have several new materials and online ministry ideas in development to continue to be the pioneer and leader in this area of much-needed pastoral ministry.

To bring Life-Giving Wounds to your parish, college campus, or diocese, please visit this page. And please check out our Get Involved and Give page to see how you can be part of writing the future of this much-needed ministry.

The Life-Giving Wounds heart was hand-drawn by the artist Michael Corsini, a member of our traveling retreat team. It depicts a wounded heart with a large central wound coursing throughout the middle and fraying the heart. There is no part of this heart that is left untouched by the wound. The wound cuts deep and affects the whole. However, notice that the wound is in the shape of a winding, frayed path to the cross of Christ, which is mysteriously present in this heart. This wounded path indicates that our wounds can be unique, intimate pathways to Christ's very own loving heart. For this reason, this heart is reminiscent of traditional depictions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which while glorified in Heaven is also wounded and suffering with humanity.

As we open our broken hearts to Christ's Sacred Heart, our wounds are transformed. This transformation is represented by the color gold in the logo. Gold is symbolic in art for eternity and divinity. Because it does not tarnish over time, gold also traditionally depicts God's ever-faithfulness, which is always present no matter the darkness of suffering, sins, or failures on the part of humanity. This divine fidelity is the unshakable ground for faithful love and healing in our own lives. Divine love pours forth into our wounds and extends out toward bystanders, drawing them into this exchange of hearts between Christ's Sacred Heart and humanity's wounded heart. This pouring-forth towards others is indicative of God's call to us to transform our wounds into life-giving resources of love not just for ourselves, but also for our family and the world.