If you have never been to the national march for life in Washington D.C. you should go sometime. You will see virtually nothing on the secular TV channels about the march because they are too biased to tell the truth. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of your fellow Catholics who come to profess commitment to their Faith and to the sacredness of innocent human life. They fill up the national mall from the Washington monument to the Capital, as well as the streets adjacent to the mall. They come to pray and to stand face to face with pure evil, sanctioned and funded by our government. They come to witness to life and to counter the lies told by powerful abortion mongering elites in American society, and by the politicians who do their bidding like whores for a pimp.
For those of us who each week pray and beg for the lives of babies in front of local abortion mills, this annual congregation of the truthful in the name of Truth is refreshing. It is also a reminder that that if just a majority of Catholics in the United States would unite in solidarity we could rid our society of the moral cancer of the blood trade of abortion. Sadly, not only do we not unite, but the very persons who control and move the levers of political power to promote the killing of the innocent are themselves professed Catholics, including laity, religious, and priests.
All of this comes to mind amidst the recent articles exposing the corruption at the Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development (DJPHD) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is old news, but that part of the USCCB is loaded with left-leaning progressive types who see nothing wrong with paying out money collected in Catholic pews to organizations that support abortion, homosexual marriage, and an assortment of other morally unacceptable causes. Lifesite News, American Life League and Bellarmine Veritas Ministry have done a most credible job in disclosing the moral rot at DJPHD, and the rank misapplication of money donated in good faith by faithful Catholics.
For many years ACORN received hundreds of thousands of Catholic dollars from DJPHD through the Campaign For Human Development. That ACORN is anti-Catholic at its core, and that it has consistently supported and promoted immoral works, including abortion and radical gay rights, did not seem to matter to the DJPHD. When Lifesite News, Bellarmine Veritas Ministry, ALL and other groups finally managed to force a disclosure of the misapplication of funds, DJPHG bureaucrats announced that they were shocked, simply shocked to learn that ACORN had been up to no moral good. However, as soon as the lefties at DJPHD thought nobody was looking they started shoveling out money to another abortion mongering group called Center for Community Change (CCC).
And all of that brings me back to the national march for life.
Beyond the huge number of faithful Catholics who assemble every year in the nation’s capitol to stand up for the Faith, what strikes most people immediately is the number of young people present. There are thousands of high school and college kids there. There are also thousands of young families. The energy and commitment of the young is irresistible and infectious. It is also deeply consoling to see these new troops joining the battle for life. Surely there is great promise!
But there is also a caution to be pronounced here.
The bishops of America are arousing the souls of their flock in the matters of life. Especially are they arousing the souls of our youth, many of whom know that but for the grace of God, and the faithfulness of their Catholic brothers and sisters who were the instruments of that grace, they would have died at the hand of the abortionist. But working to end abortion is not just a proposal in the concluding paragraph of a USCCB position paper. The Catholic message of life is not just rhetoric to motivate congregations and materialize great crowds of idealistic youths. The bishops have challenged the young to put themselves on the line for life in His name, and those same bishops better be ready to do the same. “Do as we say, not as we do” will not work, and runs the risk of a damaging disillusionment. As the hierarchy has correctly said so many times: “There is no compromise on life. It is non-negotiable.” Indeed! And that means it is also non-negotiable in the bishops’ bureaucracy at the USCCB, especially in the Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development.
