Every January the largest “religious” gathering in San Francisco makes its way down Market Street. It is the Walk for Life West Coast, which is not officially a religious gathering, but the enemies of organized religion certainly oppose it as such. Abortion is civil rights issue only because there is a God, and every human being has inviolable rights because we are all children of the one God “through whom all things live.” The enemies of God reserve their most violent intolerance for the prolife movement, as we experience on Market Street every January. I’m convinced the frenzied shouting and pornographic vulgarities unleashed against this peaceful event are the primal screams of a generation that has been robbed of its childhood, of children who had no loving father on earth and so hate their Father in heaven. It makes one’s heart bleed to hear that kind of hopeless desperation.
And yet it’s hard not to react against anger. How can we maintain steady peace and courage when it seems our next President, and our next Health and Human Services Director, will be implacable enemies of unborn children, prolife Americans, and the Christian religion? We can trust in God, besides whom there is no other hope. We can trust in the Mother of God, whom He sent to the Americas at a very difficult time. "Listen,” she said to Juan Diego: “Keep in your heart, the smallest of my sons, that there is nothing for you to fear, nothing to afflict you. Let not your face nor your heart be worried. Do not fear this nor any other illness, nor anything worrying or afflicting…. Am I not here, who am your mother? Are you not in my shadow, under my protection? Am I not the fountain of your joy? Are you not in the fold of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?”
A blessed and happy Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe!