Marriage and Family Life Supplement
‘My House’ pornography recovery and prevention site is work of the Holy Spirit
By Gabriela Ross
The struggle with pornography, and the need to provide resources for recovery and education, is not something new. However, in the last one to two years, the issue came to the forefront in several ways on the national level and in our own state of Indiana.
Those signs of the times spurred me to make our archdiocesan response to pornography on the pastoral ministry side a priority.
I began the work of piloting the “Safe Haven Sunday” pornography awareness weekend with two of our parishes during Lent of 2025 (see related article here). Around the same time, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops re-released their pastoral statement on pornography “Create in Me a Pure Heart,” which endorsed and recommended Safe Haven Sunday as a resource for dioceses.
After the successful pilot program, it was my hope to share Safe Haven Sunday with the wider archdiocese. However, there were some other pastoral priorities that took precedence at the time. One of the priests who piloted the program encouraged me to trust in God’s timing, and I took that to heart. I didn’t know at the time that God had bigger plans that would come to fruition just eight months later at the October 2025 meeting for the priests of the archdiocese.
After all the business updates at the meeting were done, the floor was open for any concerns that the clergy wanted to share with the archbishop and his leadership team. There was a priest who courageously stood up and shared how pornography is a growing issue that he was encountering in the confessional, and he felt like the faithful needed more to support them outside of/in addition to the sacrament of reconciliation.
The priest asked if the archdiocese could offer recovery resources to support on-going education and restoration for the faithful who struggle with this issue. I was able to respond with some of the resources I knew about that would help with recovery.
Then another priest chimed in and said something along the lines of, “If there are so many resources [for men, women, wives, married couples, parents, etc.], then this must be an increasingly serious issue. Is there more that we can do about it, as an archdiocese?”
The Holy Spirit took it from there.
In just under two weeks’ time, I was given the opportunity to promote Safe Haven Sunday as an optional observance for parishes that wished to participate. And I was given the bigger task of revamping the archdiocese’s “My House” website, originally launched in 2018, which hosted our resources for pornography addiction recovery.
I was amazed as all the people who would normally need to approve this project made their way through my office door, one after the other, answering my questions and giving their support and approval. I understood then that this was God’s timing, and his plan had been so much bigger than mine.
Again, in under two weeks’ time, we had revamped the My House website (marriageandfamily.archindy.org/myhouse). It includes Church teaching; pornography recovery and prevention resources and support for men and women of all age levels, as well as for couples and families; resources for pastoral leaders; Safe Haven Sunday information for parishes; and information available in multiple languages. There is also a training course called “Three Pillars to Purity” available for clergy; two members of the clergy have signed up to take the 15-hour self-paced class.
By December, the site had been shared with all of the archdiocese’s priests, deacons and parish catechetical leaders.
I have already seen some fruit come from this initiative. Parishes have been linking to the My House site on their parish websites, promoting it through their bulletins and handing out My House referral cards in the confessional. There are new parishes signing up to preach on the topic of pornography during Safe Haven Sunday, which takes place on Feb. 21-22 in our archdiocese this year.
I hope that more clergy will take the opportunity to grow in their knowledge of how to spiritually accompany the faithful in this area; that more parishes will be courageous in breaking the silence about the harms of pornography, encouraging every home to be a Safe Haven against pornography; and that parents, teachers and parish leaders will work together to educate our young people on the dignity of every human life and how pornography is an affront to that dignity.
I’m so grateful to have witnessed how God worked through this project—in his own perfect timing—and the fruit it has already begun to bear. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
(Gabriela Ross is director of the archdiocesan Office of Marriage and Family Life. She can be reached at 317-592-4007 or gross@archindy.org.) †
See more from our 2026 Marriage and Family Life Supplement