Celebration as NH gets its first Safe Haven Baby Box

On a drizzly May day, dozens of people gathered in a fire station’s bay in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, in an atmosphere that defied the grey weather. We came for dedication, blessing, gratitude, and remembrance. 

The reason was a new installation in the station’s eastern wall: a Safe Haven Baby Box, designed so that an infant can be surrendered anonymously and safely through a door on one side of the box, to receive care and fostering on the other side. The box is designed so that a signal alerts the station’s firefighters when a child is placed inside.

In one way the project was a tribute to Baby Grace, the baby in the pond. In another way it was an act of hope and faith: hope that the box will never be needed, and faith that if it is, a child’s life will be saved.

New Hampshire’s original safe haven law was passed in 2003. Any police station, fire station, hospital, or staffed church can take in an infant surrendered in accordance with the law. Now, the Baby Box offers another way to surrender a baby safely and anonymously.

“Hope and resilience for our entire community”

First responders were there for the dedication, including some of the police and firefighters who responded when Baby Grace was found in Pine Island Pond. Leaders of Pennacook Pregnancy Center were there; the Center funded the project. Father Jason of nearby St. Joseph Cathedral offered a prayer of blessing. The mayor gave heartfelt remarks. 

Manchester New Hampshire's police chief, fire chief, and mayor at a press conference
Manchester NH Fire Chief Ryan Cashin, flanked by Police Chief Peter Marr (l) and Mayor Jay Ruais (r), at the dedication and blessing of a Safe Haven Baby Box. “I can’t thank everyone here enough.” Photo by Ellen Kolb.

Silence fell over the firehouse when it was Fire Chief Ryan Cashin’s turn to speak. “Every fire station in the city is a place where the community can feel safe, knowing we are here 24 hours a day, and this Safe Haven Baby Box further demonstrates the commitment by the city of Manchester providing a secure option for vulnerable infants, making this fire station a true Safe Haven. While we cannot change the past, our commitment is to make the future safer and stronger. Today I pray that the efforts by the City of Manchester, Pennacook Pregnancy Center, Safe Haven Baby Boxes [among others]…will inspire hope and resilience for our entire community. I can’t thank everyone here enough.”

This is an excerpt from a report for paid subscribers to Braided Trails on Substack. Please visit that site to learn more.

“Thérèse: Saint of a Little Way”

My discovery of Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Thérèse: Saint of a Little Way was providential. This warm and affectionate account of the life of Thérèse of Lisieux brought the saint to life for me as no account has done before. This true story is written with a novelist’s sense of drama and an historian’s eye for detail. 

I found the book in the basement of an antique store, amidst a cluster of books marked as being linked to New Hampshire. I wondered what the Little Flower had to do with the Granite State. I soon learned that the author had lived in New Hampshire, where her husband served a term as Governor in the early 20th century before being elected to the U.S. Senate. 

Mrs. Keyes published a first edition of this biography in 1937, with the title Written in Heaven. The volume I found was a revision published in 1950 under the new title. The author spent time in France visiting the sites where Thérèse had lived, and she lived for a time at the Abbey where Thérèse went to school. Her immersion in Thérèse’s milieu left rich impressions to share with readers. Her photos taken on her trips to France complement the text.

I had not heard of Mrs. Keyes before discovering this book, but I have since learned that she was a prolific mid-century author in a variety of genres. A convert to Catholicism, her faith-related works include books about St. Bernadette and Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as an account of her own conversion.

At this writing, not even Amazon can come up with this title. Leave it to a little antique store in a small New Hampshire town to have in stock this 75-year-old hardback with its tattered dust jacket, waiting to fall into the hands of a receptive reader.

This post is shared on the Open Book linkup hosted at My Scribbler’s Heart and CatholicMom.com.

A new resource for civic engagement

A new resource from the Diocese of Manchester has much that could appeal to all Christians who want to strive for faithful citizenship. “The Resurrection and the Church’s Mission in the Public Square” unites the twin themes of Easter and the role of Christians in civic life. 

The prayers, meditations, and sourcebook are grouped into weekly sections to cover the Easter season. You’re not late if you’re just now discovering the material. Start from where you are, no matter what the calendar says. 

Mission work

From the sourcebook: “For almost all of us, the place where we are called to carry out [our] missionary activity is right at home, in the places where we live and work. There are many ways that we can do this, but over the course of this Easter Season we will be looking at one in particular: our work in the public square.” 

How that resonates with me! I’ve laid aside a manuscript I’ve written along these lines, as I’ve found that others are addressing the same subject better than I can at this point. (My manuscript is dormant, not dead, but the process to get it this far has been humbling, and rightly so.)

If you’d like to learn more about this resource, go to the “Resurrection and the Mission of the Christian” page at catholicnh.com. The sourcebook is available in printable PDF/ebook via a link at that page.

This report originally appeared on Braided Trails. Header image by Pete Linforth on Pixabay.