Grace's book is available now in the Catholic Exchange online store! Order your copy today! Faith questions may be sent to Grace via e-mail at: grace@deargrace.com. You may also visit her online at www.DearGrace.com.
Grace D. MacKinnon may seem like an unlikely candidate to be the Catholic “Dear Abby.” One of eight daughters in a poverty-stricken Hispanic family living in a small two-room dwelling on the Mexican border in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, she was born with muscular dystrophy. “
I was the one destined to be different,” Grace says. “Repeatedly I asked God why, as words cannot adequately describe the isolation felt by a child with a visible stigma. Only slowly did the ‘mission’ unfold.”
That “mission” was to impart the truth about Catholic teaching to millions of readers each week in a syndicated column entitled “Dear Grace,” carried in both secular and Catholic newspapers nationwide. Grace faced the challenge of gaining the necessary knowledge and credentials to teach the Faith by studying at St. Mary’s Seminary in Houston, Texas.
Despite such obstacles as being told by one of her professors that she would “never make it,” Grace knew she was meant to study theology. “I knew it as surely as I knew the sun would rise the next day,” she says. “The Lord gave me so many signs to show me that I was meant to be there. All of my tuition was paid for with scholarships and grants. Miracle after miracle proved to me that if I was willing to suffer and struggle and work hard, He would do the rest. And He did.”
Grace didn’t fully understand her mission at first. “I thought I was studying theology for my own personal enrichment. I didn’t fully understand God’s mission for me until I had completed my theological studies. Today, in addition to the newspaper column, I teach Catholic doctrine for the Bishop of the Diocese of Brownsville. What a privilege and honor it is to teach the richness and beauty of the Truth found in the Catholic Faith.”
For Grace, faith isn’t something cut and dried on the pages of a book. It’s a living, breathing, life-changing force. “My life has been filled with moments of grace. Suffering is indeed a great mystery. It is never to be enjoyed, but it is to be embraced, for it is all about love.” She is particularly excited about what she calls an increasing awareness of the sanctity of human life. “It’s a huge wave,” she says. “People are finally waking up to the fact that every single human life has dignity and worth. That is an exciting thing and an exciting time to be living. Catholics are starting to stand up and be proud of their faith. They want to learn it so they can teach others.”
Teaching others is what Grace does best. Every week, her readers look to the “Catholic Dear Abby” for answers to life’s truly tough questions. Now the best of her faith-based teaching has been collected in one volume: Dear Grace: Answers to Questions About the Faith, available in the Catholic Exchange online store. Some of the questions are about doctrine or the sacraments. Others are more personal. But all of them are relevant to our daily lives:
• Is it a sin to have sexual fantasies?
• Does an unbaptized baby who died in miscarriage go to heaven?
• When did Jesus know He was God?
• Is lying always wrong?
• Can a person support abortion and still receive Holy Communion?
Her answers are unique because every one has been through an exacting Church approval process — something you can’t say for most newspaper advice columns. That means Catholics can completely trust her responses. For every one who has been troubled by questions about faith and morals, Grace MacKinnon has the answers. “I hope this book is something Catholics and non-Catholics alike can use to understand the truth of the Christian Faith,” she says. “But more than that, I hope they will share that Faith with other people to bring them closer to God and the truth.”
