In 1992, or there about, on Christmas Eve, Pope John Paul II gave a talk in Pope Paul VI Audience Hall. The talk was entitled “May Life Always Receive a Welcome”.
The Pope spoke of an ancient custom of setting an extra place at the table, to remind the family to welcome and make room for Christ. He then added, “Let us have an extra place at the table for the unknown guest, but we know this guest. We know the guest even if still awaited and is only about to be born. In fact in the baby, who is not yet born, not yet revealed, there is Jesus who found the doors of Bethlehem and Nazareth closed against Him.”
The Bible makes it clear that God is love and that at the Last Judgment we will be judged on the virtue of love. How then do you think we will fare in light of the following observation “I was not yet born and you did not allow me to be born, you did not accept me.” A rather frightening reflection you might say.
The people of America have always responded with great generosity to the needs of crises around the world from the great famine of Ethiopia through the most recent tsunamis.
There is no doubt that modern media has helped to generate this generous response. When through television we witness hunger malnutrition, nakedness and starvation. It is difficult for us to stand by and not want to help. When we see it before our eyes it is difficult to deny the facts.
Today, there is a great thirst to know, to witness and to see. That is why we have journalists embedded with our military.
Along this line, then I might ask, and wonder how many people have watched a video on abortion and its realities. If you have not, then I believe you should. In fact, it might be good for you to write down your thoughts before and then after watching it. Abortion is the sin and sickness of the present generation and no one of us can become indifferent to it.
While sitting in a Birmingham jail, Rev. Martin Luther King wrote a famous letter in which he explained how early Christians rejoiced that they were able to suffer for the faith. He wrote, “In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular belief, it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”
St. Paul in writing to the Romans put it this way, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2
The Rev. Martin Luther King went on to say “If the Church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early Church it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions and be dismissed as an irrelevant social fan club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
Well across much of Europe, the Church today, is not even a social fan club. The fact of the matter is simply this. Our Catholic Church is not a fan club, we are Church or we are nothing and as Church we must be willing to sacrifice in order to protect human life including the unborn for they no less than us are also fashioned in the image and likeness of God. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart for my holy purpose. I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1:5
Rev. Msgr. Hugh Marren