Page Download(s)
file size: 210KB
Twenty-Seventh Sunday of the Year
2 October 2011
Dear Friends in Christ,
Today is Respect Life Sunday, the beginning of Respect Life Month which has been observed by the Catholic Church in the United States every October since 1972. October was chosen for the annual Respect Life Month because this month is also in our tradition a time of special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And in the Providence of God, the first Respect Life Month was kept four months before the Supreme Court swept away all legal protection for unborn life in the infamous decision of Roe v. Wade — a landmark case that is arguably one of the worst injustices in the history of our nation.
Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, Archbishop of Houston and Chair of the US Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, wrote about this Respect Life Month that “We will voice our opposition to the injustice and cruelty of abortion on behalf of those victims whose voices have been silenced. At the same time, we will remind the living victims of abortion — the mothers and fathers who grieve the loss of an irreplaceable child — that God’s mercy is greater than any human sin. Catholics must not shrink from the obligation to assert the values and principles we hold essential to the common good, beginning with the right to life of every human being and the right of every woman and man to express and live by his or her religious beliefs and well-formed conscience.”
To provide this witness to the Gospel of Life, there are several things we can do locally:
1. Participate in 40 Day for Life, the annual nationwide effort to change the hearts and minds of those tempted by abortion through prayer and public witness.
2. Participate today in the Life Chain, ninety minutes of silent witness that begins this afternoon at 2 pm along Woodruff Road between I-85 and I-385.
3. Participate in the Birthright Baby Bottle program this weekend, 1 and 2 October, an effort which raises desperately needed funds to assist young mothers with crisis pregnancies. Details are in the bulletin.
4. Always bear witness in conversation with friends, colleagues, and neighbors to the sanctity of human life and the sacred duty of all the living to protect innocent life from conception to the natural end of life. Nothing can justify the murder of the unborn, the disabled, the elderly, or the chronically or terminally ill, and the culture of death — which often advances itself in the name of compassion and freedom — must be exposed for the infernal life it truly is. We find the strength to bear such witness only in Jesus Christ who came to give us abundant and everlasting life.
Father Newman