My Dear Friends,
This weekend we welcome to our parish the young people who will be representing the Archdiocese of Maimi at next Friday’s March for Life in Washington, D.C. I have been honored to be the Archdiocese’s Spiritual Director/Chaplain for the March for Life since 2015. The young people among us come from our Archdiocesan high schools, local colleges, and parochial youth groups. We have 12 young people who will be representing our parish along with two of our Carmelite Sisters. We are indeed honored to represent the Church of the Little Flower in standing up for the unborn in our nation’s capital.
This will be the first march since Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court last year. For 49 years, we marched to the Supreme Court to protest the egregious decision made in 1972 that cost so many unborn children their lives. This year we will be doing something new and marching to Congress because now the question of abortion resides in the hands of the legislative branch of our government. Sadly, even with the landmark decision last June that we have ardently prayed for all those years, the tragedy of abortion continues in America. We need to pray for true change of hearts in our country particularly for those we elect to write our laws. And so, I ask you to pray for these young people who, under the mantle of freedom of speech afforded us in the Bills of Rights, travel to Washington to lend their voices to the those who have no voice, the most vulnerable among us, the tiny child in the womb of his/her mother. They follow the call of Pope St. John Paul II who once said, “You are called to stand up for life! To respect and defend the mystery of life always and everywhere, including the lives of unborn babies, giving real help and encouragement to mothers in difficult situations. You are called to work and pray against abortion.”
Even though the once insurmountable Roe decision has been struck down, I truly believe that now the work of the church to help sway expectant mothers away from abortion becomes more urgent and more difficult. We need to help mothers from the moment of conception to the moment of birth and beyond. This was emphasized by the U.S. Bishops back in June when the Dobbs decision came down: “Now is the time to begin the work of building a post-Roe America. It is a time for healing wounds and repairing social divisions; it is a time for reasoned reflection and civil dialogue, and for coming together to build a society and economy that supports marriages and families, and where every woman has the support and resources she needs to bring her child into this world in love.” (USCCB Statement, 6/24/2022)
May we continue our prayers, our fasting, our activism, our unyielding support of the truth, not the belief, but the truth that every life begins at conception. Every human being no matter how small or how old, no matter how rich or how poor, no matter if they are home or far from home like the immigrant: every human being is to be loved because we all receive our dignity from God above who lovingly created us in his image and likeness.
Dear young people going to Washington: thank you for your witness, your courage, and your love for human life. This parish and the entire Archdiocese of Miami accompanies you with their prayers. You inspire fellow Catholics far older than you to roll up their sleeves to work and get down on their knees to pray that every human life, especially the tiniest, be respected, cherished, and loved.
“. . . we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the “culture of death” and the “culture of life”. We find ourselves not only faced with but necessarily in the midst of this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.”
Pope St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 1995
God bless you all,
