“The greatest destroyer of peace in the world today is the cry of the innocent unborn child. If a mother can murder her own child in her own womb, what is left for you and for me to kill each other? Even in the scripture, it is written, ‘Even if a mother could forget her child, I will never forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand’ (Isaiah 49:15-16). Even if a mother could forget … but today millions of unborn children are being killed. And we say nothing. In the newspapers you read numbers about this one and that one being killed, but nobody speaks about the millions of little ones who have been conceived with the same life as you and I; to the life of God. And we say nothing. We allow it. To me, the nations who have legalized abortions are the poorest nations.” (Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979)

In this famous speech, just six years after Roe v. Wade, Mother Teresa is aghast at the spiritual poverty in our world. Where is the outrage?!?! Where are the voices for these innocent unborn children?!?! Of course, for Mother Teresa, it is a given to come to the aid of these innocent babies. Why? Because she had spent a lifetime drawing nearer and nearer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She, quite literally, “knows” the heart of Jesus.

Today’s hard-hearted and dismissive lack of concern for babies in the womb, reveals the real crisis of our times … There is a disconnect from the Divine Life of God; a real spiritual poverty in the world today. Instead of advancing in our humanity, we are becoming more and more diminished and debased. We are derailed from the great adventure of striving for higher and higher heights of existence. Losing sight of our omega point – Jesus Christ – we are left to wander, aimlessly, in the pitch dark dessert of our own estimation of life and living.

In today’s second reading, St. Paul implores us to set aside our misguided mundane and temporal lives, and enter into the full life of holiness and truth …

“Brothers and sisters: I declare and testify in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their mind; darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance, because of their hardness of heart, they have become callous and have handed themselves over to licentiousness for the practice of every kind of impurity to excess …  you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.” (Eph. 4:17-19, 22-24)

The most urgent campaign, in our effort to save the lives of these innocent unborn babies, is to, first, awaken the Divine Life in the hearts of mankind. The darkness and disharmony of our detachment from the Divine Life, must be replaced by that “new self” embarking, now, upon the ultimate quest for a more noble existence, striving to be the best Christ we can possibly be.

“Instead, clothe yourself with the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. And don’t let yourself think about ways to indulge your evil desires.” (Romans 13:14)

Then we will know the way, the truth and the life. Then we will be Christ for others. Then the mothers’ wombs, once peaceful, now violent, will become peaceful again.

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.