It was a shocking story when it first came out in the media. A professed religious from a Dominican convent in Illinois openly supports abortion on demand, and to confirm her support she has worked at a Chicago area abortuary for a number of years, assisting and encouraging pregnant mothers to kill the innocent children in their wombs.
And there was more.
A few weeks later the same pro abort Dominican popped up in the news again when, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, she publicly thanked pro abortion senators who had voted to defeat pro life legislation in the United States Senate. For theological justification of her pro choice/pro death joy at the failure of a law intended to protect the innocent, she said: “I was reminded of being with men and women from the Unitarian faith tradition last year as they celebrated Mary who by her assent, they believed, was one of the first women in the New Testament to express choice.” Huh? Mary, symbol of a woman’s choice to kill innocent life in the womb? Sister has a vivid revisionist imagination.
In maybe 18 B.C or even a few years after that, a child was born. This child, a girl, was given special and abundant graces, and was even spared from the stain of original sin. When the child became a young woman she was visited at her home in Nazareth by the angel Gabriel who announced her favor with God, telling her that she was selected to be the mother of the Son of the Most High. The Word, said Gabriel, was to be made flesh in her womb.
Unquestionably, free will was involved in this drama of the heavenly messenger and the young Jewish woman, and in that sense it was indeed a matter of choice. Even without original sin, God demanded that her decision be a work of her free will. So at that moment in Nazareth the young woman had a choice. Would she cooperate with God’s plan for salvation of mankind or would she reject the Divine request. The future of the world hung in the balance.
We know what happened. The result of her answer is inscribed on the crypt altar in the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth: Verbum Caro Hic Factum Est. The Word was made flesh here. Mary’s decision offers no more support for the pro abort Dominican’s involvement in the blood trade of abortion than does the proper application of anyone’s free will on any moral issue. As Pope John Paul II said so often, true freedom is the freedom to do what you ought to do. Mary’s fiat is the opposite of the choice to kill the child in the womb. It is the opposite of that sister’s choice to help mothers choose death for their children in the abortion chamber.
Where the abortion seeker and the abortionist conspire and act together to evict from the womb life created by God, Mary, in contrast, cooperated with the Creator to create and nurture life in her womb. And that difference reveals the essence of the evil of abortion. That which God has created in His own image, to know, love, and serve Him is destroyed by the procreator and her abortionist. There is no room for life in the womb.
Unlike the mother who chooses to kill her unborn child, Mary made room in her body for life. She made room in her own life for the life of her child created by God Himself. Pope Benedict XVI in Mary The Church At The Source writes that Mary’s “life is such she is transparent to God, ‘habitable’ for Him. Her life is such that she is a place for God.” (Page 66).
The Holy Father goes on to explain that Mary’s freedom to act resulted from grace. That is, he says, “grace does not cancel freedom, it creates it.” Because of her Immaculate Conception, Mary’s fiat “is contained wholly within the primacy and priority of divine love, which already embraces her before she is born. ‘All is grace.'” (Pages 89-90).
Indeed the story of the Annunciation and Mary’s agreement to cooperate in the divine plan is a story of grace and God’s never ending invitation to all mankind to enter into a personal relationship with Him, and to come and live and be within the Trinitarian Community, the Kingdom of God. Significantly, the pope reminds us also that the concept of grace, too often reified, is more precisely relational. “In reality, grace is a relational term: It does not predicate something about an I, but something about a connection between I and Thou, between God and man…Grace in the proper and deepest sense of the word is not something that comes from God; it is God Himself.” (Pages 67-68).
Because grace is relational the creation of a human being by the procreative union of a husband and wife is an act of grace. Similarly, the relationship of mother and unborn child, the former protecting and nurturing, and the latter growing and developing in response to the nurture, is grace filled. The giving of life by the parents, especially the gestation of the child in the womb of the mother, creates in the child from the very beginning of life the imprint of gift and a reflection of the Divine Plan. The child, individual and unique, is loved by God who is the creator of his life, and first experiences this love through his parents, God’s pro-creators.
One then must make room for Grace as Mary did. “God does not sit in a heart that is occupied,” said St. John of the Cross. Maybe someday the politicized sister from Illinois will make room and let her heart be cleansed. Maybe, as we all should, she will allow her life to become habitable for Divine Love, “a place for God.” Then she will no longer lead mothers to the abortion chamber, but bring to them the Lord of Life just as Mary brought the same Lord to the world, and just as we are all called to do.
