Today,
the first Sunday in October, we priests across the country are asked by our US
Bishops to address a Respect for Life as an essential part of our Catholic
faith. In fact,
all through the month of October, we will celebrate and recognize Respect Life
month through our liturgies and different activities in our parish. When we
look around and see how life is not respected in a lot of way in our country,
we see all the greater need to address this issue. We have
recently witnessed continued acts of random terrorism that we just cannot
understand, such as the bombings at the Boston Marathon and the attacks at the
mall in Kenya, Africa. In the
last few years, we have seen mass shootings, such as in the elementary school
in Connecticut and at the movie theater in Colorado. My home
town of Chicago had 532 murders last year, and many of our towns and cities
experience so many acts of destruction and violence. We have
seen our war on drugs fail miserably, and we have seen more than one million
unborn children killed by abortion each year. We might
get frustrated seeing these things, wondering how we are to announce a respect
for life in the midst of all this going on around us? How can we seriously say that we are
proclaiming the reign of God’s kingdom when all of our efforts to stop or
curtail the culture of death around us has failed. And that is exactly what Pope
John Paul II called this reality of our modern world – a culture of death.
We hear
the prophet Habakkuk cry out to the Lord in words we might use – Why Lord, do
we look out and see ruin and misery, violence and destruction, strife and
discord around us? Habakkuk
tells God that he sees the wicked surround the righteous in the world, that
justice, when it comes, is distorted. Then
Habakkuk says – “Then the Lord answered me…” The Lord
tells him to write down his vision, that it will have it’s appointed time. Sometimes we want results immediately, but things happen on God’s time, not our
time. God tells us to be patient, to
have faith. In fact,
the Gospel tells us that with faith as small as a mustard seed, we can do
wonders.
In the
spirit of Pope Francis, in the way he’s reached out to so many people
throughout the world, the theme for Respect Life Sunday this year is “Open your hearts to life.” We are
called to be people of compassion, hope, and action with our respect to life,
to bring this compassion, hope and actions to our words and our deeds. By
opening our hearts to Christ’s love and mercy, we let Him dwell in us and we
see more deeply the intricate and unique beauty of each human person. Though
we as human beings are capable of sin, of straying from God’s commandments,
none of us are beyond repentance – none of us are beyond receiving Christ’s mercy. We are called to be witnesses and to share this
message with others, not only during Respect Life month, but throughout the entire year. We are
called to reach out to the prisoner, to the sick and the elderly, to speak out
against things like capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, and lack of
access to health care. And we are to do
so in a way that is compassionate and healing.
We
invite all of you to participate in our Respect Life activities. Before
the 10:30 Sunday and Saturday evening masses this month, we will pray the
rosary one half hour before mass, with pro-life mysteries for rosary. We will
also have a special prayer service here on the grounds of St James at 12:00
noon next Saturday to pray for the respect for life. There
are things we can do – we are not to be inactive or complacent. But, as
God tells us, through our prayers and our actions as we proclaim the Gospel of Life, we are to be patient, to
have hope, and to have faith.
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