Weekly messages from our Pastor

There are so many wonderful events on our calendar this coming week and during the coming year. I would say the common thread running through each one of them is the word, “life”. This Sunday is Respect Life Sunday, Tuesday, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, we will bless animals, and starting Sunday we will begin our Family Mass.

We pause to remember this Sunday, all life comes from God, and all human life is sacred. This Sunday, we should ask ourselves, “do I truly believe all life is sacred from conception to natural death, and do I reflect this belief in what I say and in what I do”?

My friends, the theme for this year’s Pro-Life Activities is, "Hope and Trust in Life." As Catholics, it’s important that we be educated, but also it’s imperative that we be vigilant. For instance, in Oregon, where assisted suicide is already legal, the state has refused to cover the cost of life-sustaining treatments for some patients facing terminal illness, while callously informing them that Oregon will pay for suicide pills. Such policies betray the ideal of America as a compassionate society honoring the inherent worth of every human being.

Embryonic stem cell research also presents grave ethical concerns. The Catholic Church strongly supports promising and ethically sound stem cell research -- and strongly opposes killing week-old human embryos, or human beings at any stage, to extract their stem cells. We applaud however the remarkable therapeutic successes that have been achieved using stem cells from cord blood and adult tissues.

Turning to abortion, while Catholics are against abortion in all cases, it’s important to note that most Americans favor banning all abortion or permitting it only in very rare cases (danger to the mother's life or cases of rape or incest). Also encouraging is the finding of a recent Guttmacher Institute study that the U.S. abortion rate declined 26% between 1989 and 2004.

Today, however, we face the threat of a federal bill that, if enacted, would obliterate virtually all the gains of the past 35 years and cause the abortion rate to skyrocket.

FOCA, the "Freedom of Choice Act" establishes abortion as a "fundamental right" throughout the nine months of pregnancy, and forbids any law or policy that could "interfere" with that right or "discriminate" against it in public funding and programs. If FOCA became law, hundreds of reasonable, widely supported, and constitutionally sound abortion regulations now in place would be invalidated. Gone would be laws providing for informed consent, and parental consent or notification in the case of minors. Laws protecting women from unsafe abortion clinics and from abortion practitioners who are not physicians would be overridden.

Many other restrictions on partial-birth and other late-term abortions would be eliminated. Many additional laws and restrictions protecting life would be knocked down by FOCA. We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot tolerate an even greater loss of innocent human lives.

In this Respect Life Month, let us rededicate ourselves to defending the basic rights of those who are weakest and most marginalized: the poor, the homeless, the innocent unborn, and the frail and elderly who need our respect and our assistance. In this and in so many ways we will truly build a culture of life. God bless you.

Respectfully in Christ,
Fr. John Francis Murray, C.Ss.R.

Please note: Excerpts taken from Cardinal Rigali's Statement for Respect Life Sunday

Question of the Week

Pray for married couples. How does your parish support them? How do you?
Based on the reading for the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time.