Last year, living so close to the Nation's capitol we all went to the Life March. Kotch and the three littles and I went up on a parish-sponsored bus from Woodbridge to DC. We arrived around noon and left around 5:00p.m. It was a long day ... filled with life and hope and faith that someday our country would turn this all around and stop killing the babies (and the lives of the women who abort their children).
This year, unfortunately, only some of us are going.
Kotch is on her way with other kids from
Ave Maria University. She got on a bus yesterday in Ave Maria, Florida at 5:00 pm and as of 1:30 pm, they'd gotten as far as Fredericksburg! She'll spend the night at the National Shrine, bunked in with other college kids from across the nation (she's got two cousins that will be at the March -- one representing Franciscan and one from DeSales). After a full day of praying and marching and praying and singing and praying some more .... they'll head back south on the bus, buoyed up knowing they've done a good thing.
Dh is heading up to the March tomorrow morning: he'll leave the house at 4:00 am, picking up students on the way to school, and then getting on chartered buses to head into D.C. for the Youth Rally/Mass at the Verizon Center. He'll get back home sometime around 6:00 pm, tired but buoyed up knowing he's done a good thing.
The littles and I are participating vicariously. We will be up watching
EWTN's coverage starting on Friday morning (7:30 EST) to try and spot our various family members. We'll then head to Mass at 9:00 am, staying for Benediction and wishing the bus riders from our parish God-speed.
In the words of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta when writing to the
US Supreme Court, February 14, 1994 about a pending case:
It was a sad infidelity to America’s highest ideals when this Court said that it did not matter, or could not be determined, when the inalienable right to life began for a child in its mother’s womb.
America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.
It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society.
It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered domination over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.
And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.
Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.
The Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany recently ruled that “the unborn child is entitled to its rights to life independently of acceptance by its mother; this is an elementary and inalienable right that emanates from the dignity of the human being.” Americans may feel justly proud that Germany in 1993 was able to recognize the sanctity of human life.
You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth.
I have no new teaching for America. I seek only to recall you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world.
Your nation was founded on the proposition—very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as a political insight—that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect.
Unfortunately, some 16 years later, we in America still have Roe v Wade and the deaths of millions of babies on our collective consciences. Please join us at the National March -- either physically or spiritually -- as we all pray to overturn this heinous blot on the American escutcheon!
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