| U.S. News

We have been thrown together in a common defense of life in a western culture which has lost its moral compass. Our Marching together for Life is becoming a road to our growing communion.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - On January 22, 2009 thousands will gather in Washington, D.C. to give their voice to our neighbors in the first home of the whole human race. These are the children who await their welcome among us upon birth. These littlest neighbors need our voice because theirs is being muffled behind the wall of their mother’s womb, once considered the first refuge of safety. There in their first experience of the interdependency which reveals the truth about our humanity, where they are supposed to be embraced by the warmth of love, they are vulnerable to the worst kind of domestic violence. At any moment the weapons of the first “pre-emptive war”, voluntary abortion, may be wielded against them for any reason. Make no mistake; these are weapons of death and destruction - chemical, surgical or suction – being used to kill them deliberately for any or no reason. That is the cold, hard truth about every procured abortion.

No one with integrity any longer argues that the child killed through abortion is not a human being. When the abortion occurs through miscarriage we properly enter into the mourning of the mother over the loss of “her baby”. However, when the mother is deceived into a voluntary abortion we use a different vocabulary. Most people now acknowledge that these children killed by abortion are human persons. A few hold on to the dangerous notion that dependency upon others makes someone less of a person. However, medical science has confirmed what our consciences and the Natural Law told us all along, these victims of the first “preemptive war” are human beings just like us. We frame “baby’s first pictures” in their 3D Image through sonogram technology. We use intrauterine surgery to intervene to save them or correct anything which they may need before they are born. We prosecute an offender who, in the evil act of harming their mother, causes their death as well. It is all so very clear what we are really doing in every procured abortion.

The “argument” now used to justify this preemptive war is that the choice to kill them should be left to the mother in consultation with her own Doctor and/or other counselors. This is presented in a language of “freedom” and clothed with a counterfeit compassion. However, there is no moral difference between the killing of a child after birth and the killing of a child before birth. We legally excuse fetal homicide when it is committed by a misguided mother through the agency of a deceived or corrupted Doctor who once pledged to “do no harm”. We call it “healthcare” or a “reproductive” choice.Under our new administration the Government may soon extract tax dollars to pay for it.

It is ironic that this 36th March for Life will take place only days after our nation rightly celebrated a great advance against another intrinsic evil, racism, and the horrid memory of its once institutionalized expression, slavery. The election of our 44th President signals progress against what the Catechism calls a “structure of sin”. However, it is rooted in the same evil idea that some human persons are less worthy of being welcomed within our National family than others. Evil ideas have a horrid way of repackaging themselves.We will mourn, pray and demand justice.

It is noteworthy that in the 36 years that we have marched some unexpected good has come to us. In our insistence that the positive law recognize what the Natural Law demands, that these children have a right to life,we Christians have found one another. That is why I believe it is no accident that the March for Life falls within the national week of prayer for Christian unity. Our human rights struggle has been the most fruitful and authentic form of ecumenism the world has ever witnessed.The Prayer of Jesus echoes in the Church in this new missionary age: "I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me." (John 17:20-23)

There is a reciprocal relationship revealed in these words. The world will believe our gospel when we demonstrate our own unity of love with one another. The prayer of the Son of God will be answered; the only question is how soon it will happen. We hasten that day when we choose to pray together and work with one another. That is the message that the great apostle Paul proclaimed to the Ephesians: "Brothers and sisters: I, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, ...