Loreto House: All Women are Welcome in This Place

Loreto House sits about one mile north of Denton Presbyterian Hospital on Bonnie Brae Street. Presby (as it’s known around town) is the only hospital in Denton, Texas, to offer full-scale maternity services; there is no Catholic hospital. Loreto House’s mission is to help more women in crisis pregnancies choose Presby over Planned Parenthood. Although they offer pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, they are not a clinic, and they state that fact on every page of their website. Instead, they are there to love and support women at a time when they need it most.

This article is long overdue. I met with the people at Loreto House in February of 2020 and spent some wonderful time getting to know them. However, the pandemic and a series of personal challenges struck. As a result, the article sat neglected on my hard drive. In the meantime, Loreto House is not only thriving but expanding, adding about double their space and building a second facility in Flower Mound. So, with due apologies, let’s finally meet the people who are putting the Catholic Church’s social justice teaching into action.

How Loreto House Began

In 2007, Randy Bollig was a home builder and real estate agent specializing in large homes surrounding the city. “I built mansions,” he smiled. However, he was under severe financial pressure. A homeowner had included his company in a significant lawsuit, even though the builder’s warranty had expired two years previously, and the legal bills had drained his reserves.

Laurie Bollig, his wife, was then a counselor with Gabriel’s Project, a pro-life apostolate of the Fort Worth Diocese. Recently, a Denton County woman had come to them looking for support. Among the calls Laurie made was to a support center run by Evangelicals. One of the requirements for help from the group, however, was conversion. Laurie explained, “Oh, no. She’s Catholic; she already has religious support from her priest.” The person with whom she spoke said, “I’m sorry, we can’t help her, then.”

Dwelling on this conversation grew in Laurie a conviction that she and her husband should open up a center in Denton that would operate according to Catholic social doctrine. But when she initially presented this conviction to Randy, he resisted. “‘No way!’” Bollig explained his reaction. “I didn’t even know if we could make the next house payment.” After some discussion, they spent the next two weeks praying the rosary over the matter, at the end of which Randy finally agreed. Says Bollig, “We firmly believe the Blessed Virgin Mother was speaking to her.”

All Are Welcome

From opening their original location in a strip mall to today, Loreto House’s operations and clientele have gradually built up. Driving the expansion is excellent word-of-mouth: Of 79 Google reviews to date, the average rating is 4.8 stars. “The most loving group of people that I’ve literally ever come across,” wrote Denielle P. “… I no longer feel alone.”

Alone. Almost by definition, a crisis pregnancy is one in which the pregnant woman feels—or has been—isolated from their support network. A 2017 study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons reported that the majority of the post-abortive women who responded to their survey had felt some degree of pressure to abort or had aborted to make others happy. However, coercion isn’t always one-sided. Coleman et al. also reported other women had felt pressure to keep their child and considered society’s reaction to their decision to be judgmental. No one seems to listen to the woman or understand her position.

“We’re not here to judge them,” said Marjorie, who has been with Loreto House for eight years and had had an abortion herself 37 years before. (Her work with Loreto House, she said, has helped her to heal from that traumatic decision.) Many of their guests walk away with the counselors uncertain of their choice. “We have to lay [those cases] at the foot of the Cross.” But, said Marjorie, some women come back after their abortion to share their grief and regrets. They, too, are welcome.

Not all the returns are tragic. Huyen, who has been with Loreto House a few months, told me of a young woman who came to speak with Marjorie, who was out for the afternoon. “She told me Marjorie wanted her to bring the baby if she chose to keep it.” The young woman was holding her child closely, affectionately. “It was so beautiful to see,” Huyen said, smiling. And not all the guests are ambivalent or abortion-minded. One couple, Debra said, immediately told her that they intended to keep the child. They simply needed help with the financial side of the pregnancy.

They, too, were welcome.

Working in Loreto House

Naturally, there are many stories. As we entered his office to begin the interview, Bollig started telling me of a 15-year-old Mexican girl who had been kicked out of her parents’ house. Since Loreto House, for all its other services, is neither a hostel nor a shelter, I wondered what resources they could call on to get the young girl housed. Bollig explained, “In most cases, the woman isn’t really in danger of losing the roof over her head. … [In this case,] we’ll try to rally some kind of support from other family members. And we’ll have to get [Child Protective Services] involved because kicking a child out of the house is child abuse.”

Their hands-down favorite story concerns a young couple, two first-year students from the nearby University of North Texas (UNT). At first, it seemed both young people were abortion-minded. The counselor took the young mother into a counseling room while Bollig spoke with the father in the waiting area. Over time, it became clear that the father was the one more opposed to the birth. However, after an hour and a half’s discussion, Bollig brought him back to the counseling room, where he embraced his girlfriend and said, “We’re going to have this baby.”

The couple is now happily married and expecting their second child. They appear on the Loreto House mission video.

Over time, the emotional highs and lows take their toll. Marjorie confirmed that some counselors had become burned out and had to leave. “Sometimes, they wonder if there was something they said, something they could have said …. They end up blaming themselves.” Laurie Bollig’s conversation with the Evangelical support center still informs Loreto House’s efforts to avoid undue pressure or emotional coercion. It is just as crucial to the counselors’ emotional well-being that they leave the woman free to make her own decision as it is to support the choice for life.

“We just lay the facts out for them,” Randy Bollig explained. He handed me a copy of Texas Health & Human Services’ booklet, “A Woman’s Right to Know.” While the brochure includes facts about the risks of bringing a pregnancy to term, it also illustrates that “safe abortion” is an ill-defined, relative term. It also contains pictures and facts of fetal development which contradict the claim that the unborn are mere “clumps of cells” or “blobs of protoplasm.” The Texas HHS imprimatur carries greater weight than the counselors’ words alone.

Comfort, Help, and Security

Loreto House offers more than testing, ultrasound, and counseling. Besides working with local, country, and state agencies to help support young mothers and families, they also provide classes in pregnancy and birth, parenting, and life skills. Said Huyen, somewhat wistfully, “I wish I had these classes when I was a young mother.” Loreto House also provides material support for women with children up to two years old, including a unique and charming fixture: “St. Gianna’s Gift Shop,” a room where guests can select their supplies in a store-like atmosphere rather than picking through boxes and bags. “It gives them dignity,” Bollig explains.

Besides spiritual companionship, Laurie Bollig leads a group that makes gifts for the mothers “that may contain candy, lotion, or other items that help pamper our guests,” said Randy Bollig in a follow-up email. Loreto House also features a chapel on-site, where a local priest celebrates the Mass once a week. Guests and visitors who wish may enter it for their prayers. However, neither Bollig nor the counselors make an effort to convert non-Catholic guests. “There are too many plates spinning in the air that require more immediate attention,” says Bollig. All women are welcome, whatever their religious beliefs.

The decor strives to make the guests feel as at home as possible. At the same time, Bollig is very security-conscious. The entryway lets people accompanying guests be comfortable while they wait but also keeps them separate, unable to intimidate the women during counseling. It also protects everyone from hostile intrusion. Security cameras monitor several locations. One of the cameras helped to expose a fraudulent visionary who claimed to be followed by angels.

At least once a year, feminists from UNT stage a protest outside Loreto House. Very rarely are there more than ten at a time; Bollig wasn’t sure they would be back this year. However, whenever they do protest, support and contributions to Loreto House increase. Smiled Bollig, “I’d love to have them back.”

The House that Bollig Built

As we were getting ready to part, Bollig expressed concerns about the possibility of violence and upheaval should Roe v. Wade be overturned. There are too many people with vested interests in the abortion institution, and not all their motives are altruistic or ideologically motivated. The laws of supply and demand are amoral. Like drugs, so long as the social problems behind the demand for abortion go unaddressed, attempts to shut off the supply will be futile, perhaps counterproductive.  “I think they’ll leave us alone,” Bollig confessed, “but you never know.”

I remarked to Bollig that I’d heard so many abortion advocates ask pro-lifers, “What are you doing to help women in crisis pregnancies? How are you supporting them?” Echoing Sr. Joan Chittister, they accuse the pro-life movement of being merely “pro-birth,” of being uninterested in addressing the problems that drive vulnerable young women to abortion. Centers like Loreto House go at least a part of the way toward addressing the “demand” side of the abortion equation. Bollig nodded. “Social justice in action,” he replied.

Of all the houses Randy Bollig has built, he has most cause to be proud of Loreto House.