The Catholic Standard and Times

Singer-songwriter is anything but an ‘average’ college student

By Nancy Frazier O’Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — Her life is just like any other 19-year-old college student’s.
Except for the press conference in Washington in April. And the appearance in Kansas City, Mo., in May. And the concert at World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, last week.

“I lead a pretty average life,” said singer-songwriter Kara Klein, who is wrapping up her freshman year as a philosophy and voice major at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

“I’ve traveled more than I’d like to this year,” she added. “I’ve had so many blessings, but I’ve learned that with blessings there are also sacrifices.”

One of Klein’s blessings is a close family in Mandeville, La., where she belongs to Mary Queen of Peace Parish. Another is a beautiful voice that got her to a part in a local community theater production of “Babes in Toyland” when she was six years old, followed by “many more musicals,” and more choirs than she can count.

But the Klein is not just another girl with a pretty voice. She writes her own songs, including the 10 on her first CD, “A Touch of Your Grace.” She’s also written “tons and tons of songs” for a second CD but has not been able to find the time to record them.

Her latest recording, “Still Beautiful — Terri’s Song,” is dedicated to Terri Schindler Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman who died this spring after her nutrition and hydration were withdrawn under a court order that was obtained by her husband and fought by her parents.

“Do you think I’m beautiful now?” the song asks. “Even when you’re carrying me because I am too weak to walk,/And I have lost control of everything somehow./Do you think I’m beautiful now?”

Klein sang the song in late April at a reception for members of Congress and for women from all over the country who had come to Washington for a lobbying event. She will sing it for members of the Schindler family in June at the National Right to Life Committee convention in Minneapolis.

“That’s going to be really difficult,” she said. “But I’ll be completely depending on God’s grace. I’m always very dependent on Him.”

Klein said she was not thinking of Terri Schiavo when the words to “Beautiful Still” first came to her.

“Sometimes I don’t understand why I write them,” she said of her songs. “I was in a place where I was struggling, feeling very broken — something we all feel.” Those feelings made her think of asking God, “Do you still see me as beautiful?”

But, she said, when her mother first heard the song, she immediately said, “‘That’s Terri’s song.’”

It was from her mother that Klein got her strong pro-life views. The singer is dedicating one dollar from the sale of each “A Touch of Your Grace” CD to the Susan B. Anthony List, which helps fund the legislative and congressional campaigns of pro-life women candidates. Profits from “Beautiful Still” are going to the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, which works to protect the disabled from euthanasia.

Although she had always been pro-life, Klein said her eyes were opened to the culture of death when she had an opportunity to attend a special session of the United Nations on children’s rights in New York in 2002, during her sophomore year at St. Scholastica Academy in Covington, La.

The session’s draft document, “A World Fit for Children,” called for allowing abortions for girls as young as nine years old without parental consent, rewarding teens for condom use, and establishing five genders — homosexual male, heterosexual male, homosexual female, heterosexual female and transgender — instead of the usual male and female.

Those provisions were removed from the document before its final passage.
Klein and her friends who attended the session “could not help but wonder how world leaders could hope to help the young women of the world by indoctrinating them into a mentality of violence and death,” she said at a press conference April 27.

“It’s frightening to consider where our world will be in the near future if we do not put a stop to this culture of violence and death,” she added.

After her scheduled appearances this spring and summer, and the trip to Germany for World Youth Day, Klein is not sure what life will bring.

She said she found it “very hard to really focus on my music,” and difficult to be so far away from her family while she was at Catholic University, and she’s decided to take a year off from school to record her second CD. She is considering continuing her education with distance-learning classes from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.

And then? “I’ll be speaking and singing,” she said, “and seeing where that leads.”