International Youth Coalition

Biography

Erin Gallo is a junior at Columbia University in New York City and plans to graduate in May of 2020. She is an American Studies and Religion major and pitches for the Lions softball team. After graduation, she hopes to study and enter the field of journalism. She is passionate about the pro-life movement and aims to promote the dignity of the human person in everything she does. When she is not playing softball or studying, she enjoys reading, writing, attending Mass, watching sports, and spending time with her family at their Massachusetts home.

Thoughts

“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

-Pope John Paul II

Whenever I was training to be a softball pitcher, my dad would tell me, “if you only love something when it’s easy, then you don’t really love it”. In doing so, he was preparing me to overcome the challenges I would inevitably face in trying to be a successful player. There were plenty of days I didn’t want to work at it and days when it would have been easier to just give up. But having heard these words so often, I came to learn that doing only what I wanted would never allow me to grow. This is a lesson that has come to have meaning for me far beyond sports. Life is not easy and sometimes doing what we want is not what is best for us. But when we embrace the struggle and choose only what is best for ourselves and for others, we come to know the fullness of true love and happiness.