Students for Life March and Rally to include procession from St. Agnes to State Capitol

Josh McGovern
January 9, 2025

Students from St. Agnes School in St. Paul join other pro-life supporters at last year’s annual March for Life at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

On Jan. 22, the 2025 Students for Life March and Rally will take place in part on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol building in St. Paul and then on the Capitol steps from 12:30-1 p.m.

The rally will also include Mass, talks from national pro-life leaders and panel discussions at nearby St. Agnes School, and a student-led Eucharistic procession from the school to the Capitol for the annual MCCL March for Life organized by Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL).

At 10:30 a.m. the same morning, Bishop Michael Izen will preside at the annual Prayer Service for Life at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul. After the prayer service, many participants will process to the Capitol to participate in the MCCL March for Life.

The student rally is geared toward high school students, with the Office of Marriage, Family and Youth in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis predominantly inviting Catholic high schools in the archdiocese and some home-school groups.

Most of the student rally, including the Mass and activity sessions, will be held at St. Agnes. After their Eucharistic procession — almost a mile and a half from the school to the Capitol — students will participate, then bus back to St. Agnes for more activities, including a series of short talks about Catholic youth involvement in politics, sidewalk counseling and how to be more active in the pro-life movement.

Bridget Lippert, the archdiocese’s youth discipleship events and communication coordinator, said the Students for Life March and Rally is important in educating young people who can make a difference through voting, or who are on the cusp of being able to vote.

“They’re emerging adults,” Lippert said. “Part of the rally is to also really empower them and encourage them to be active in being for life. Being pro-life is not just something that you are, but it hopefully should impel you to take action. That will be a good half of our topics during our programming. What now? What can you do?”

Lippert suggested that there are ways other than voting for emerging adults to be active in the pro-life movement, such as sidewalk counseling and volunteering at pregnancy centers.

Jay Watts, with Merely Human Ministries, an organization that equips pro-life advocates with communication tools to defend human life, said he will talk about “making a case for the value and dignity of unborn human life.”

Kallie Fell, executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network (CBC) based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, explained that her talk will focus on three aspects of assisted reproductive technologies: egg donation, surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. Fell will be joined by Jennifer Lahl, CBC founder.

Maggee Hangge, the policy and public relations associate with the Minnesota Catholic Conference (MCC), has been in contact with Lahl and the CBC to keep them updated on legislative changes in Minnesota. Hangge invited Lahl and Fell to come to Minnesota on Jan. 22 not only to speak to high school students about the risks of assisted reproductive technologies, but also to offer Minnesota lawmakers information and background in these areas.

Fell explained that egg donation and gestational surrogacy carry health and psychological risks that often go unreported.

“There’s no registry tracking,” Fell said. “These women who sell their eggs or who rent their wombs, once the eggs are collected and once a baby is handed over, that woman is lost in what we say, medical history. We don’t track her. Does she have a higher risk of having cancer later? What are her psychological risks? We do know short term though that there are health and psychological risks, and that’s something (that) the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network (is) really concerned about.”

Lippert said that with Minnesota being a pro-choice state, the big challenge for pro-life individuals is vocalizing their opinions, especially for young people and young men. Lippert recalled a time when she talked to a high school student at St. Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights who said that young men feel like they can’t have an opinion on reproductive legislation because it’s a “woman’s issue” and that vocalizing a contrary opinion to pro-choice would result in being labeled “anti-women.”

“Young people are told in our culture that even if you have an opinion about this, you can’t say it, you can’t vocalize it,” Lippert said. “Some of the challenge is trying to, again, empower them to have a voice and be bold in a culture that doesn’t really want to hear their opinion.”

In previous years, students traveled to Washington, D.C., in January to take part in the national March for Life rally there. In 2021, however, a trip to Washington wasn’t possible because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the archdiocese held a youth conference at St. Agnes and other sites and rallied at the Minnesota State Capitol. With the Supreme Court decision of June 24, 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade –– the high court’s decision of 1973 that made abortion legal across the country –– the focus has turned to state legislation on abortion. The 2025 Students for Life March and Rally will be the first since 2021 to be held at St. Agnes and at the Minnesota State Capitol. Plans now are to alternate each year between a local march and joining the national rally in Washington, said Lippert.

Typically, the archdiocese sends about 180 high school students and others to the march in Washington. Lippert is expecting 500 to 600 Catholic school students at this year’s march and rally.

“They did something locally during COVID just because they couldn’t go to D.C.,” Lippert said. “But it was fairly different than this … . There’s some precedent, but it’s going to look very different than even that event.”

“We really do think that this event will provide them (young people) with greater confidence in understanding why they are pro-life or why they should be pro-life,” Fell said. “It will give them some tools to better defend that stance.”