About Us
What we do.
We’re here to offer a Catholic response to the secular culture and defend the family against today’s destructive ideologies by offering and supporting a society based on the traditional teachings about life and family. We want to help you in your work to restore Christian culture in the Carolinas.
Learn more
Today, many advocates of secular culture are working full-time during the day in their own paid professions across the Carolinas to undermine the family and the dignity of human life. Although not often directly coordinated, their efforts work in concert to perpetuate a “culture of death” or anti-family culture. Carolina Family Coalition offers a local counter-response through our activities to empower and mobilize Catholics to help restore Christian culture in their communities and workplaces.
Catholics are looking for a way to reclaim the narrative and restore Christian culture in their communities, schools, and workplaces. We assist them by addressing the roots of the breakdown of the family and society and disregard for human life. We do this through:
- evangelizing the local culture by re-presenting the timeless teachings, traditions, and principles of life and family, from a Catholic perspective
- and offering ways for Catholics to directly participate in this renewal in their personal and professional lives.
Carolina Family Coalition not only focuses on the topics of direct attacks against human life (abortion euthanasia, cloning, contraception, etc.), but also addresses broader pro-family issues in a distinctly Catholic way. That includes traditional marriage, sexuality, bioethics, family values, religious freedom, conscience rights, and Catholic culture – topics and teachings necessary to address the declining culture.
We accomplish this through Masses, prayer vigils, conferences, lectures, study groups, advocacy campaigns, developing apostolates; and promote other local pro-family activities, which unpack the traditional teachings on life, family and culture and reintroduce it into local society here in the Carolinas. We also work closely with clergy and other leaders. As part of this mission, we also focus on evangelizing the various local employment fields, trades, and industry (medicine, law, education, art, architecture etc.) to enable Catholic workers to restore traditional values and teachings in their fields or trades, all in order to build up Christian culture in the Carolinas.
Our goal is to help restore the building blocks of Christian culture in the Carolinas.
Our History.
In 2015, Catholic Respect Life leaders from across Charlotte founded the Carolina Pro-Life Action Network (C-PLAN) to help coordinate and organize city-wide Catholic pro-life activities. In 2018, recognizing that a more organized and formal structure was necessary, and one that focuses on the broader culture and attacks on the family, C-PLAN leaders founded the Carolina Family Coalition to help address the declining culture, the breakdown of the family. Carolina Family Coalition is incorporated as a 501(c3), tax exempt organization.
Patron Saints
St. Maximilian Kolbe, born Raymund Kolbe in 1894 in Poland, was one of the brightest scientific minds of the early 20th century who discerned a call to be a Catholic priest and was ordained in 1918.
Kolbe, a Franciscan, founded the Militia Immaculata a year before his ordination in 1917 to combat the attacks against human dignity, family and culture during his priestly life. Using his love of science and technology, St. Maximilian Kolbe helped start up a printing press in his native Poland (and later Japan) to help spread the faith, and also used contemporary tools of mass communication as part of his evangelization effort. The work of the Militia Immaculata was to combat the errors of his day including Communism, Nazism, Freemasonry, and Darwinism. After being arrested by the Nazis, he died on August 14, 1941, sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz Concentration camp and was canonized as a saint on October 10, 1982.
St. Maximilian offers us a saintly example of how to heroically evangelize against today’s anti-family ideologies movements.
From May through October of 1917, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, appeared once a month to three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, calling for repentance and sacrifices offered for the conversion of sinners.
In August after presenting the children with a frightening vision of hell, where poor sinners go, she asked:
To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.
The apparition was approved by the Church and, as Pope Benedict XVI noted in visit to Fatima in 2010, “We would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.” The message of Fatima even was noted among non-Catholics, such as former President Ronald Reagan in his 1985 visit to Portugal.
As the world continues to suffer under the errors of Russia (e.g. communism, cultural Marxism, and socialism), Our Lady of Fatima is a critical patroness to combat the evil ideologies of our time through prayer and sacrifice.
Karl von Habsburg was the last emperor of the Austria-Hungary Empire who ascended to the throne unexpectedly amidst World War I, a war which he inherited without choice.
Born in 1887, he was the last in a line of Habsburgs who ruled a Christian Europe, and reigned from 1916 – 1919. After World War I he was deposed and when refusing to renounce his crown was forcibly exiled to the Portuguese Island of Madeira, where he died on April 1, 1922. In 1971, his body was exhumed and found to be incorrupt.
Married to Zita of Bourbon-Parma on October 21, 1911, he lived a saintly life, both on the front lines in the military, and during his brief rule as emperor. During his reign, he constantly pursued peace to bring an end to World War I; focused on maintaining peace among the various ethnicities in his kingdoms, and sacrificed himself in various ways for his people. His virtue made such an impression on one Polish soldier serving under his command that he named his son after Emperor Karl, Karol Wojtyła, who later became Pope St. John Paul II, and went on to lead the spiritual crusade to end communism in Europe.
Emperor Karl was also devoted to his wife and eight children (the last being born after his death), and had a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He was beatified in October 2004 by Pope St. John Paul II, and his wife Zita, who died in 1989, is now declared a servant of God (the first step toward sainthood).
Blessed Karl of Austria was a man of heroic virtue who was devoted to his family and his people despite the troubles of war and politics, and reigned over the last parts of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, otherwise known as Christendom, where culture was inculcated with Christian values.
Through his dedication as a father, husband, and his faithful reign as a Christian emperor, Blessed Karl represents an ideal role model to help restore the family and Christian culture.
