At 6:20 a.m. on a recent Friday, I went to Mass at the local pro-life center. The Mass was celebrated by our bishop, a man dedicated to pro-life issues who is generous with his time in this apostolate, including saying a weekly Mass at the center when he is not out of town on diocesan business.
The little chapel at the center, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, is well-appointed with a beautiful tabernacle and a hand-crafted altar, but it is barely large enough for the celebrant and an altar server. The chapel opens up through double doors to the “nave.” The “nave” is actually a small lobby/storeroom/work area where the pro-life volunteers gather for Mass. Notre Dame cathedral it is not.
After Mass that Friday the volunteers dispersed to two local abortion mills to pray and distribute information to the abortion seekers about the financial and spiritual help that is available at the center, and, not least, to beg for the lives of innocent children. The abortion mill which I went to that morning is located in a small, unattractive building on a dead-end street in an area that has definitely seen more prosperous days.
These less-than-grandiose venues which I have just described appear very small and localized. But what we see with our limited human eyes is not all that there is. It is not just a small, small world after all.
All creation comes from God. He creates from nothing, and there is no creation unless the infinite God of all creation wills it. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be” (John 1: 1-18). St. Paul tells us that all creation is in, through, and for Christ. “For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominations, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him and in him” ( Col. 1:16).
Moreover, there is no continuing creation unless God continues to will it. All creation is dependent on God for its existence. God has “spoken to us through the Son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe, who is the refulgence of his glory, and the very imprint of his being, and who sustains all things by his mighty Word” (Heb. I: 1-6). St. Paul also wrote in Colossians, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). Among those “things” is life.
If God is the Creator of all life and “without him nothing came to be,” and all life is sustained “by his mighty Word,” and in Him “all things hold together,” then the child in the womb of the pregnant mother walking to the door of the abortuary came to be through the power of the infinite Father acting through His infinite Son, and that child in the womb lives and moves, and has his being in Christ. His life is sustained and held together by the power of the same creative love from which he came into existence.
Even if the act of the mother and the father in conceiving the child was not licit, the new human life that is the fruit of their participation in the act of creation is good. “God saw what he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Even a morally illicit act which resulted in the conception of a new human being, even an “unwanted” human being, does not detract from the goodness of that person, does not lessen his humanity, and does not change the reality that a human being with an immortal soul is now in existence, and the same free will that the parents used for their participation in creation should rightfully be used to sustain that life.
An omnipotent Being Who has created everything everywhere, including earth and the entire universe, has in His infinite love created the child who is now marked for death, and He has entrusted the life of that child to the free will of those who have participated in the child’s creation. How they respond to that trust has earthly consequences for sure, but if the creation of the child was a cosmic event, so also is the failure to sustain that created life. And so it is that at that drab and unattractive building on a dead-end street in a rundown part of town, where innocent human lives are sacrificed in greed for blood money that is paid in desperation and selfishness, the battle between the culture of life and that of death is waged on a truly universal stage.
However, there is hope. We are not left on our own in the struggle for life and death. The little altar of the small chapel at the pro-life center, with the lobby/storeroom/workroom “nave,” looks so small, and the worshippers so insignificant, but our human perception is deceiving. On that altar the greatest of all events on earth and in the entire universe takes place every time the Sacred Liturgy is celebrated.
Pope Benedict XVI has written extensively on the Sacred Liturgy as a cosmic event. In The Spirit of the Liturgy then-Cardinal Ratzinger reminded us that the Christian liturgy “is never performed solely in the self-made world of man.” Rather it “is always a cosmic liturgy.”
I think that Pope Benedict would likely see the little chapel at the pro-life center not as a limited, mundane, and isolated place, but rather one of astounding cosmic proportions, a place where the Almighty reaches out to His worshipers at Holy Mass, and bears them up to the precincts of heaven. I think that he would also recognize the truly cosmic dimensions of the action of members of the Mystical Body of Christ, standing in front of an ugly abortion mill on a dead-end street, begging a mother and a father to sustain the life of the child whom they have, in participation with the omnipotent God and Creator of all life, brought into existence.
