Making The Choice

Dear Fellow Helpers, I am posting in regards to our next peaceful prayer vigil which will take place on Saturday, the 7th of February, outside Planned Parenthood (345 Whitney Avenue New Haven) from 8am until 12 pm noon, the hours which the babies are scheduled to be killed by abortion. Please join us and take an hour of prayer. Abortions also take place on Wednesday afternoons and Friday mornings form 8-12 noon. If you feel compelled please bring a prayer partner and offer your prayers and fasting then.

A friend of mine sent me the meditation below written by Father Frank Pavone from Priests For Life. It reminds me that once our society decided that a women’s “right to choose” to end the life of the baby growing within her was more important than that baby’s right to live, the sanctity of human life from conception till natural death was severely desecrated. As long as our culture views the unborn as nothing less than a “choice” invisible to the naked eye, all of our lives are at risk. If our culture does not believe that every life holds equal value and only God has the right to decide when it should end, who is to say that when we are “less than convenient” or “hard to look at” through illness, some form of impairment, or increasing age, that someone else will not make that same “choice” whether we are to live or die against our own will? With the euthanasia movement on the rise one need not look far to see that the value we place on unborn life applies to the perception of the value of our very own. I was astounded the other day to learn that ninety percent of babies “diagnosed” with Down Syndrome in the womb are aborted. Can you imagine how many beautiful babies have been killed because they were viewed as less than “perfect or normal”? Can you imagine how many more people would now be in the room? Please read father Frank’s meditation and prayerfully consider offering your time in prayer with us at Planned Parenthood, the place where many of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters are sentenced to die. Let us make the “choice” to value each one of them.

May God bless you,
Mike and Kerry


Blessing the Grave

I had the privilege of blessing the grave of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, who was murdered on March 31, 2005 by dehydration. Her grave is not far from the place where she died, and where people from around the world had gathered to protest and pray.Those who visit the gravestone, however, will notice something highly unusual. While on most graves there is an inscription of two dates - when the person was born and when he or she died - on Terri's there are three. Here's exactly what the grave says:Born December 3, 1963Departed this Earth February 25, 1990At Peace March 31, 2005The whole world knows that she died on March 31, 2005. National and global media were present at the scene for days, covering every detail. Media were present again when I preached at her funeral mass. We know when she died.But her gravestone has become a pulpit for the euthanasia movement. Those who killed her are now using her grave as a platform for their twisted ideology. What they are trying to say is that once her brain was injured in 1990 and she was no longer functioning like most of us, she wasn't one of us anymore. She "departed this earth." This is actually a variation on an ancient heresy, which says that we are really spirits inhabiting a body. Terri couldn't communicate normally. So, her "spirit" must have left her. The body was just a shell left behind. Those who believe she really "departed this earth" in 1990 can therefore pretend it was OK to kill her in 2005. After all, it wasn't really her. She was already gone.This is heresy, because Christianity teaches that we are a unity of body and soul, not simply a soul "using" a body. The body matters. What we do to the body, we do to the person.Moreover, the gravestone inscription is a deep insult to all who are disabled, and to all those who love and care for them. Should they be considered already dead, too? Are we just wasting our time caring for them? Euthanasia advocates would have us think so.A recent news story about a disabled unborn child quoted one as saying, "There's no human life there." Isn't that the same idea? They think the baby has already "departed this earth," so they don't hesitate to abort the body.As I blessed Terri's grave, I also prayed that God's people would be kept safe from this falsehood. And I recalled being in Terri's room the day she died. I remembered her face, dehydrated from not having had a drop of water in two weeks. I recalled seeing the flowers, inches away, on her night table. They were immersed in water. And as I left the grave, I gave a final glance to the vase of flowers that was standing by the stone. --Fr. Frank