The following homily was delivered by Fr. Thomas Berg, L.C., on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at Villa Maria Guadalupe Retreat Center in Stamford, CT.
News flash: Vatican City, Sunday, November 23, 2008. “His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI announced today that the Catholic Church is formally drawing an end to evangelization efforts in the world and shelving plans for the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ in the world. A high-ranking Vatican official who asked to remain anonymous, was quoted as saying: “The attitude here is that ‘if it hasn’t happened in 2000 years, it ain’t gonna happen’.” The Pope was unavailable for further comment.
* * *
Can’t imagine such a scenario, right?
Of course not.
That news flash just ‘ain’t gonna happen.’ Never.
There are folks out there, however, who say—and who thought—that the pro-life movement (by the time this year’s presidential campaign rolled around) had failed. And they consequently cast their vote for the man who will arguably be the most pro-abortion president in the history of the United States. The logic—or illogic—seems to have been: if we haven’t been able to stop abortion in 35 years, then ‘it ain’t gonna happen.’
Well, about a dose of reality. The 35-year struggle against federal court-imposed abortion on demand is still a relatively young one. As my friend Nik Nikas has pointed out, the lessons of the long struggle for black civil rights are instructive:
· 246 years from the advent of American slavery to the end of the Civil War;
· 100 years from the ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery to the passage of the Civil Rights Act;
· 58 years from the announcement by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" public accommodations for blacks and whites was constitutional to the reversal of that decision by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.[1]
So, after only 35 years, it would seem that the pro-life movement is only at the beginning of its battle, not at the (failed) end of it. (It might be good for someone to remind Mr. Obama, by the way, that change—‘change we can believe in’—takes lots of time!)
How then does today’s celebration of the Kingdom and of Christ our King have to do with all of this?
Well, it’s quite simple really: The Kingdom—the establishment of Christ’s Kingdom…takes time.
It’s been two-thousand years! And we’re still going at it!
And our efforts to build a culture in which the life of every human being from conception to natural death is respected and cherished…takes time.
So, it’s going to take more time to overturn Roe. And it will take more time to hit critical mass in the culture and get to that tipping point of effectively and definitively turning public opinion against abortion-on-demand, although some polls would indicate that we’re actually already pretty close to that point.
And let’s remember that our hope in the pro-life movement is based on. It’s certainly not based on candidates X, Y or Z.
Our hope has to be based on the Trinity:
-- on the patience of the Father, who is always the Father waiting for the return of the prodigal son;
-- on the infinite mercy of the heart of Christ… always waiting for more and more souls to be brought into his embrace…
-- on the fecundity of the Holy Spirit… always raising up new children in the Church…
***
So let’s peacefully accept that we are in this for the long hall. All of our efforts are going to take a long time.
Dear, Sisters of Life: your mission is going to be a long one. We wish you could maybe run out of clients; no more pregnant single women struggling to keep their children, no more abortion counseling to do… Would be nice if you could just dedicate yourselves to the contemplative life—and maybe to producing and selling jams from your monastery like the Trappists at Spencer, Mass. do… But I don’t think that’s in the cards. Your mission is going to be a long and vital one.
And it is will be a long and vital mission for all of us, and we have to gear up to endure. We have to be ready to endure…
Because we are called in the pro-life movement to embody that enduring love of the Trinity. Our mission is—not unlike that of St. Therese of Liseux—to ‘be love in the heart of the Church.’ Our first weapon in continued offensive to protect human life, and to build a culture of life has to be that: love.
When we love, we can be sure, that we are not failing.
And let’s remember today too that our efforts ride on the prayers of that throng of millions of souls whose lives were terminated in the womb or in the laboratory…
Their prayers go up constantly for those who were responsible: “Father forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing…” And: “Father, forgive them, even when they did know what they were doing… Father, forgive them… and bring us all into your Kingdom.”
We ride on their prayers. They too are love in the heart of the Church. And we must continue to be love in the heart of the Church. We must fight our battles with the weapons of love, mercy, forgiveness, endurance and above all, by speaking the truth in love… and by being the voice of reason in the face of culture which more and more loses touch with reason.
***
To conclude, then, a word of encouragement—especially for those still feeling like they just got mugged by life… struggling with discouragement… feeling like you lack the strength to continue. Take to heart these words of encouragement from, no one less than, Teddy Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena;
whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows the great enthusiasms,
the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course;
who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly;
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls
who know neither victory or defeat.[2]
That’s where we want to be: in the battle, bloodied, enduring, loving, using the weapons of love, charity, forgiveness, mercy, drawing our strength from Faith, Hope and Love, trusting without limits in the that Good Shepherd who reminds us today:
I myself will look after and tend my sheep.
As a shepherd tends his flock
when he finds himself among his scattered sheep,
so will I tend my sheep.
I will rescue them from every place where they were scattered
when it was cloudy and dark.
I myself will pasture my sheep;
I myself will give them rest, says the Lord GOD.
The lost I will seek out,
the strayed I will bring back,
the injured I will bind up,
the sick I will heal.[3]
In him, in Christ the King of the Universe, we have placed our hope, and we look forward with joy to that Kingdom, where every tear will be wiped away, the hope of which must give shape to all we do, and sustain us in the battle for a culture of life.
God bless now.
Father Berg a priest of the Legionaries of Christ in Thornwood, NY, and Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.
[1] Taken from Nikolas T. Nikas, “The Young Battle for Life” available at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjRiMjE2OGJhYzQ4ZWJkMjg5ZDQ2MTljNTBmZjIwMzE=
[2] Cited from Dordina Bordlee and Nik Nikas, “Witness” available at http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MjQ1NmYxMjBhMmJkN2I2ZTAxNTYzZGYzNDc1NmFkYmM=
[3] From the first reading at mass, Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17.
Comments