By Father Kyle Seyler
On this Respect Life Sunday, in what the Church has designated as Respect Life Month, I would like to start by sharing a powerful memory with you today. The 51st annual March for Life was held in Washington, D.C. this past January, and I was privileged to be a part of it, along with a group of people from our parish and some people from Beloved Disciple Parish in Grove City. It actually began the night before the march, with a holy hour of Eucharistic Adoration here in the church. Immediately following this late holy hour, we all boarded a bus together and began our five hour+ trip to Washington, D.C. If I remember correctly, there were about fifty of us altogether, and even though the passenger bus that we rented was large, it was pretty tight quarters. We drove to D.C. through the night, but as some of you know, it is really hard to get any sleep on a bus, especially on one as crowded as ours was.
When I went on the March for Life in years past during my time at Our Lady of Peace Church in Erie, we “woke up” at about 5:20am to stop at a place for breakfast, and then we arrived at the Capitol One Arena in downtown D.C. shortly before 7:00am. We all went through security and then spent about twenty minutes or so just looking for somewhere to sit in the stadium. There were thousands of people in the youth rally there from all across the country, and there was even a group of 120 people, including their bishop, from the Diocese of Sydney in Australia. Several people gave talks, one of them being from Nigeria. There was great Christian music, people prayed the rosary together, and we all participated in the Mass together. Our schedule was a little different last year, not permitting us to participate in that large event at the stadium, but our destination of course was still the same.
We all went out into the streets, in the cold winter weather, towards the Washington Monument for a rally. Standing in the mud and the slush with people of so many different groups, we listened to several speakers. We stood there for over an hour, until the march finally began. We marched to the State Capitol with tens of thousands of people from all over the country and many from other countries. After the March, we boarded the bus and drove five hours back to Meadville, arriving here between 11:00pm and midnight, right in the middle of a blizzard. Lots of standing and walking in the cold, limited access to bathrooms, long rides on a bus, little-to-no actual sleep, and all the smells and scuzzy feelings that come with going without a shower all made for a very tiring day of sacrifice. Needless to say, when I got home, I crashed on my bed and slept in the next morning.
Why would people choose to put themselves through all this, not just once, but year after year? The answer is simple – we need to. When I was in my first priestly assignment in Erie, we were not forced to go on the 46th Annual March for Life in Washington D.C.. Last year, the group from our parish was not forced to go on the 51st, nor were we forced to make that tiring pilgrimage, but we did because we must march. We must march because for the past fifty one years in our country, we have tolerated and embraced through our laws and policies an evil, an abomination, that has stained the history and soul of our nation. In 1973, the Supreme Court decided for the whole country that it was legal in all fifty states for unborn children in the womb to be murdered, and since then, well over sixty-two million children have been slaughtered in our country alone! That is an average of around 3,600 children killed in the womb each day, and yet, beyond the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade, there are still many people in our nation who defend this genocide and strive to preserve it, saying that it is “reproductive healthcare.” Imagine that: apparently, ending an innocent life is taking care of one’s health and well-being. Those same people say that they’re not pro-abortion, but pro-women and pro-freedom, despite their claim that abortions can and often are good things that liberate women who do not want to be burdened by a child. Those same people will persecute those who desire to protect the life of the mother and the child, those who look at children as gifts from God and not accidents or burdens that can be useful in obtaining a child tax credit.
Many people in our government, in our media, in many of our companies, and even many within the Church who call themselves Catholic, have been sustaining this atrocity for decades. Disney, for instance, has been offering to actually pay travel expenses for any of its female employees who need to go to another state to get an abortion. We live in a country where we enjoy so many liberties for people of all walks of life, yet in large part, we still do not respect the fundamental right to life, the right that is the foundation for all the other rights we claim and care about. This is the insane irony in so many of our country’s politicians, who claim that they and their policies respect and include Americans of every race, religion, class, and sexual orientation, but of course only pertain to those Americans who are allowed to be born and have a life. So many human lives have been ended by abortion, so many women’s lives ruined by it too as they suffer from the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of it, but many people all the while still defend it vigorously and aggressively. Such is the darkness that has held sway over us all these years - human wickedness, indifference, and deception at its very pinnacle.
We as human beings, as Christians, and as Catholics cannot be silent in the face of this. As members of the Body of Christ, we have a duty and a mission to stand up to this evil. Through Baptism, we share in Christ’s identity and role as Prophet, and we must not fail in that mission because millions of lives and billions of souls are on the line. This is why we marched on that Friday last winter, why we embraced all the inconveniences and discomforts of the day and of the expedition. This is why we will never stop marching until a culture of life prevails in our society. We stand for the beauty and dignity of all human life which God’s hands have made, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, because all life is sacred and precious. We must stand and march, each in our own way and in our own capacity, for those who are the most vulnerable in our midst, those who literally have no voice.
The day of the march was tough, but we must all be willing to march a thousand times more for the truth, for goodness, love, and life. It is not easy; we will be hated, we are hated, by many for doing so. People want us to remain silent, just as there might be some here in this church who want me to remain silent right now, but we cannot be quiet about this. We cannot stand idly by while God’s beautiful creations are being destroyed, while our own brothers and sisters are being extinguished before they even see the light of day. And so, we march. We march in the way we vote, in our prayers for the legal protection of the unborn and for an end to abortion and all other crimes against human life and dignity, and in the way we give witness to God’s great gift of life by our words and by how we treat one another. In all these different ways, we march, not just because we choose to, but because we need to.
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