It's a family matter!

Homily
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
3 October 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

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In my first parish, on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision each January, we had a rose procession at each Mass. This last year, the procession must have been 37 people long, starting with someone born in 1973, and ending with a mother carrying a new child born in 2010. Each person in the procession carries a rose representing those children who were never given the chance to live because of the scourge of abortion. This procession gets me every time. It hits me hard. I was born in 1974. I was conceived six months after the Roe v. Wade decision. I have always lived in a country where I have tremendous freedom, but a country that did not and still does not defend my right to be born. The pro-life movement is personal to me. I cannot stand by and not stand up for the most defenseless in our society, for children who are at risk just like I was in 1973. I will be standing today at the corner of 23rd and Iowa at the beginning of Respect Life month, praying with and through Mary for mothers and fathers and children. I will continue to go on the march for life as often as I can until abortion is ended. I will continue preaching about abortion, and doing everything I can to support those families and those individuals who want to choose life not death. I will not resign myself to the way things are today. I will not be discouraged, for as Lord says clearly to the prophet Habbakuk in today's first reading. Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time,presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;if it delays, wait for it,it will surely come, it will not be late. I look forward in hope to winning the greatest civil rights struggle of time, securing the right to life from conception to natural death in a country that I still believe can and should be a light to every nation, a nation that has been chosen by God to pursue life, liberty and happiness in the fullest way possible, not the way we do it today. I know the battle will be won, and I look forward to the joy that will come on that day.

I will say that the longer I work in the pro-life movement, however, the more I see that the victory for life must be won beginning at the level of the family. Saying this does not make the law of our land any more just, nor does it excuse us from making the right to life the fundamental issue in every election of our politicians, nor does it excuse any of us from doing everything we can to stand up for life and to help those who are in danger of hurting themselves and their children. We must do more to change our unjust laws and to help people. We must pray, and fast and give alms to win this battle. Still, on Respect Life Sunday, we must be honest about why the debate has become so intractible in our society. How can something so evil as abortion come to be protected by law? How can something so terrible and hopeless be seen as necessary? The answer, at least I believe, is the breakdown of the family. As the family goes, so goes a society, and so go its children. If the family is dying, children will also die.

Abortion indeed becomes a perceived necessity, and it becomes a horrible reality, in a society where marriage and the family are compromised. The wide use of artificial contraception begins the cycle of treating fertility as as a disease, and divorces the sexual act from its full meaning and fruitfulness. The result is the cheapening of human sexuality, the degradation of human persons, and people who lack spiritual and emotional depth using each other for physical pleasure. Marriage and the family cannot survive in a culture that is always working against the formation of the virtue of chastity. The less chaste we are, the less capable we are of marriage. And we are becoming a nation incapable of marriage. Because of artifical contraception, chastity is a rare virtue, and is seen as an optional one, and those few who do enter into marriage often enter into it without this mature capacity of seeing and loving another person not as a means to an end but for their own sake. Artificial contraception makes us vulnerable as well for the tidal wave of pornography that has damaged almost every person in our society.

When sex is cheapened and robbed of its full meaning and dignity, marriage suffers. Fewer and fewer people are getting married, and marriage has suffered to the point where it is being redefined as anything that two people want it to be. Like the sexual act that itself has been robbed of much of its dignity, depth, complementary and fruitfulness, so also marriage is being emptied of its full potential and meaning in our society. Marriage doesn't mean what is used to mean. And this is the terrible environment in which we protect a woman's right to choose. In an environment where it is getting harder and harder to see and to know and to choose the good, we are afraid to point out the good, and we give women the option of choosing the bad because of our own cowardice. In a society where men are not formed in chastity, where government no longer knows how to define marriage and family, and where Churches are no longer effective in challenging and forming young people who are preparing their hearts and minds and bodies for the vocation God has chosen for them, we tell women to make good choices for themselves. Any society that makes abortion a good option for women is a nation that has abandoned its people. It is all a great cop-out, and terrible schizophrenia, when a nation with ideals as high as ours can say incredibly stupid things like we should keep abortion legal and rare. Can we still listen to ourselves? We should keep a desperate and destructive choice as an option? Why have we lost hope that we can help people to choose the good? Why? It is because we no longer believe in our marriage and in our families. It is only a society that has given up on justice, a nation that has abandoned its marriages and families, a nation that has lost its soul and its heart, and a nation where the natural light of reason is no longer purified and elevated by the revelation of God, that keeps abortion legal.

We must press onward despite the difficulties. All of us in the pro-life movement however, must realize that changing the law is necessary, but we must also find a way to give our families hope. Yes, the battle must be won at the level of the family. And we, who have been given the gift of seeing clearly God's plan for the human person, who can see clearly the potential and depth and beauty of marriage between a man and a woman, who know how to support our children by teaching them how to prepare their hearts and minds and bodies for beautiful vocations, beautiful ways in which they can live out Jesus' command to love one another just as I have loved you, it is up to us on Respect Life Sunday not to resign ourselves to the decline of our great nation. We are to press onward in the fight for the fullness of life, to have life and to celebrate life, and to live with that joy that nothing can take away from us. We must stand up and defend our children and their right to life. For as St. Paul tells us, what is about to be poured into our hearts again this morning through the gift of the Holy Eucharist, is not a spirit of cowardice, but a spirit of power and love and self-control. So let us press onward with this spirit, and do what we are obliged to do, alongside our Lord Jesus, who makes standing up for life a joyful duty!