"Stand Stark and Strange": Pro-Life Witness in the Culture of Death

A piece on the subject from Catholics United for the Faith's flagship publication Lay Witness magazine. Excerpts:

...But our efforts, like similar efforts everywhere, seemed to be the most provocative thing imaginable to many people. “How dare you politicize prayer?” demanded fellow students in the school newspaper. “How dare you attack women making a very difficult choice?



We represented a sign of contradiction by doing a very simple thing: kneeling in prayer outside the site of a hidden holocaust, one of many such sites in our country and around the world. We were there, bearing witness to the reality within, and some people could not bear the smallest glimpse.

Prayer sheds light, you see, as does the presence of the Body of Christ. We go, and God goes with us, joined to us by covenant and creed, by sacrament and self-donation. Even the sinners in the Church bear that light within, those marks of baptism and confirmation, the name of God and the Sign of the Cross upon us.

So, of course, our war was not with flesh and blood, but with the powers and principalities of this present darkness—hence the prayers. Hence the pro-life movement. Pro-life, not anti-woman, not anything other than a group of people saying, “It is the most unnatural thing in the world, in human history, for the womb to be the deadliest place on earth, for mothers to pay for the killing of their children, for fathers to insist the women bearing their children seek to destroy the fruits of their wombs.”

Yes, point to the iniquities of pagan days, the worship of Moloch, the service of bloody mouthed gods, the enlightened culture of death in other lands and other ages. Point to these and decry the Christian intolerance of similar sacrifices—you do us honor by such polemic...