By FR. FRANK PAVONE
(Editor’s Note: Fr. Pavone is national director of Priests for Life.)
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I have been attending the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., since 1976, when I was a senior in high school. I had, at the very same time, begun paying more attention to my faith, to the Scriptures, and to the Church. Since those early years of the March, I have thought and spoken much of the theological dimensions of this massive, annual pro-life event.
With some exceptions, the participants in the March for Life are believers, and with a few more exceptions, are Christians. And they are Christians from every segment of the Body of Christ. The March — and the pro-life movement generally — is in fact one of the most powerful manifestations of Christian unity in our world today. And interestingly, the March falls each year within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (January 18 to 25).
Within a few months of one another in 1995, Pope St. John Paul II issued the encyclicals The Gospel of Life and That They May be One. And in both of these documents, one about pro-life and the other about Christian unity, he calls on the disciples of Christ to reach across denominational lines to secure the rights of the oppressed. In one of my favorite lines of The Gospel of Life, he declares, “No single person or group has a monopoly on the defense and promotion of life. These are everyone’s task and responsibility.”
Marching for life should indeed deepen our desire for what our Lord prayed on the night before He died: “May they be one.”
The March, furthermore, is an intriguing mixture of joy and sorrow, of mourning and celebration. People there truly are joyful. In some ways it has the feel of a family picnic and the joyful enthusiasm of a football game. There is laughter and singing, there is the clasping of hands and the raising of hands, there is cheering and praise. And yet, all who come are burdened with a heavy heart for the babies being slaughtered, the families being devastated, and the nations being wounded by abortion.
That sorrow, those tears, are on display, particularly in the presence of the “Silent No More Awareness Campaign,” of which I am privileged to be pastoral director, and through which the testimonies of those who have had abortions, and who are the family members of aborted children, are shared. But we all have a broken heart, whether abortion is in our family or not.
The March for Life gathering is not motivated by self-righteousness, but rather by repentance. We are all turning to the Lord and saying, “Have mercy on us for not having done more to protect these children.”
So we have joyful sorrow. We have hopeful grief. St. Paul says, “We grieve but not as those who have no hope.” We have pain because of the violent deaths of the children who are aborted, but we have joyful hope because we know death does not have the last word. It has been conquered in Christ. As we march, we are both fighting a battle and celebrating a victory. It is the “already but not yet” of Christian theology. Death and sin have been conquered, but we must still announce and apply that victory.
The march can be seen, in this sense, as both a recommitment to fight abortion all during the year, and a march of prophetic victory, pointing to the day when we will march in celebration of the end of abortion.
Then, of course, there is the intersection of faith and reason. Christians affirm both. Reason has been weakened and darkened by sin, but not destroyed. Faith enlightens and transcends reason, but does not contradict it. And so, in the various speeches at the March, we hear both expressions of faith and arguments from reason. We are strengthened in our religious convictions, and we are also strengthened in the conclusions that reason itself reaches — through science, psychology, sociology, and logic — about how wrong abortion is.
The March also affirms the Christian, biblical principle of community. “We should not stay away from our assembly, as is the custom of some, but encourage one another, and this all the more as you see the day drawing near” (Heb. 10:25). The March is an assembly that not only bears witness to the government, to the media, and to the world about our pro-life convictions, but by which we first of all bear witness to one another that we are not alone in those convictions.
The March is an assembly, an experience of Christian community, the gathering of a family from so many different parts of the country, and even the world, drawn together by the Word of God who has united Himself with every human being.
These are just some of the theological dimensions of the March for Life. Whether we are there in person or participating via media or websites, we can let this be a powerful spiritual experience that will deepen our faith and our witness before the world to the God who is Life.
Find out more about the pro-life movement and about Priests for Life at www.ProLifeCentral.com.
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