UPDATE WITH VIDEO: Once They Get Into the Shelter, There’s the Concept of Grace

Just ahead of this year’s Christopher Awards ceremony, where the film “Gimme Shelter” (now on DVD) will be one of our honorees, Catholic News Service profiled one of the movie’s inspirations: Kathy DiFiore, the founder of Several Sources Shelters, who I’ve interviewed a few times myself.

Kathy, age 67, has been in the business of providing shelter for homeless, pregnant young women for close to 35 years. Here’s what she told CNS about her work and the movie:

“I thought that the movie was a very excellent depiction of what these young women go through when they’re traumatized with an unplanned pregnancy,” she said. “They need a support group, love, confidence, and a direction so they can become good mothers.” Writer-director Ronald Krauss, who spent more than a year visiting DiFiore’s shelters, “captured it magnificently,” she added.

Asked whether the need is greater now for the young women who enter her shelters, she told CNS, “I see the need as greater for them to be taught about God and his love. And I see the (women’s) ability to transition and to think, ‘yeah, there is a God,’ and the ability to give God a try or the sense that the Holy Spirit can guide them. We give each of them a Bible, and their exposure to even that concept is, ‘OK, I’m going to read this.'”

Entering a shelter, most women have “a lack of knowledge of God, but once they get into the shelter program there’s the concept of grace — that they are loved, and that God loves their baby, and that he is accessible to them. And that’s a good thing, a good thing,” she noted.

Read the whole story.

UPDATE: Kathy DiFiore appeared on WCBS-TV yesterday to discuss receiving a Christopher Award for “Gimme Shelter” last week. Watch her interview below.