September 27, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — The following is based on comments I made last week at a gathering of pro-life leaders in Washington, D.C. In this article I have expanded on the remarks to provide a fuller context to my thesis of what all pro-life leaders are called upon to begin doing at this time of grave crisis.
We are seeing a catastrophic decline in birthrates and the general moral and spiritual climate throughout the West and now even in the formerly religious United States.
These are all signs – strong signs of loss of purpose, loss of hope, loss of treasuring of life itself, especially the new lives of the babies and children and also of the frail and vulnerable elderly and a decline in the perceived value of natural marriage, the source of new life and by far the best circumstance for the nurturing of new life.
We make many plans, discuss many issues at pro-life meetings, develop excellent strategies, but the greatest power that we have, the one that has transformed entire cultures and has made the world a far better and more meaningful place in which to live does not get the degree of attention, I suggest, that it should.
Conversions
At one time, I was a strong advocate of population control, contraception, abortion and sexual liberation. I was a dues-paying member of Zero Population Growth and lived a very secular, self-serving and consquently miserable life. And then, one weekend, thanks to the kindness of a close relative and the personal witnesses of a wonderful, faith-filled and deeply loving team on a Cursillo weekend, my life dramatically changed. My eyes were opened wide and I was able to see and accept truths about faith, life, marriage and family that I had been totally blind to.
I was astounded by how much I had been lied to by my professors, the media and others and how terribly closed-minded I had become as a result.
LifeSite co-founder, John-Henry Westen, had his own, different conversion experience from a hedonistic, secular life, as did many of the people I have worked with these past 38-40 years in the pro-life movement.
It was Jesus Christ – His grace, that changed our vision, changed our lives and provided powerful motivation to achieve great things – not for pro-life, not merely for the babies and their mothers, but much more for the love of Our Father in Heaven – the Creator of all precious life who loves us all with a love that is incomprehensible to us.
The cause of current catastrophic developments
Currently, despite many very significant achievements, especially in recent years, I believe the pro-life movement is facing catastrophic developments in the world. There is an enormous amount of frightening, bad news that we are having to report every day. Our staff cannot keep up to it.
This catastrophe has its roots in the collapse of religious belief and practice throughout the developed world. The collapse of the birth rate and the moral culture is ultimately bad fruit of this faith collapse. In fact, our entire civilization is facing an implosion with numerous evil forces very ready to fill the vacuum created by this collapse.
However, all is never lost, because of the always unlimited power of grace that can overcome anything – if only we would believe in and call upon this grace.
The key to overcoming the great evils is to include specifically Christian evangelization as a substantial part of our daily work. That, I believe, will give it a power to move mountains, so to speak, that we would never have thought we could ever move.
At LifeSite, we cover a wide variety of issues. The Trump presidency, thanks to the very effective evangelizing efforts of persons such as Alveda King and many others, has in general been a very bright light amidst the frightening, growing darkness. It is however a tenuous positive that we should do all that we can to support, to hold accountable and to positively influence.
We would be foolish, however, to not realize that there is a constant possibility that the Trump regime could collapse and be lost overnight at any time given the extraordinary, if not diabolical hatred and powerful national and international forces arrayed to destroy Trump and the Republican party. In my lifetime I don’t think I have ever seen anything as intense and as evil in the political realm as we have been seeing since Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. election.
The ONLY answer to the great evils in our time
In our LifeSite reports we have increasingly been including faith issues, apologetics and evangelization with the purpose of creating an understanding that life ultimately has a spiritual purpose above all else. Through our reports we convey the great wisdom of the Church Fathers and the life-affirming and restoring teachings and principles of authentic Christian faith. We especially include a lot of Catholic teaching because of the massive failure of Catholic catechesis over the past several decades. That is affecting the entire world because of the historic great influence of the Church on moral issues.
The ONLY answer to the great evils of our time is Christian evangelization – to open the minds and hearts of people to the truths taught by Jesus Christ for our eternal salvation.
LifeSite has surprisingly received generally very positive responses to this development in our reporting and much gratitude has been expressed for the help that we have been giving to view all the issues that we cover from a spiritual perspective and for giving much practical Christian spiritual and moral teaching within our factual reporting.
In our view, the only real hope that we will be able to counter the massive forces attempting to destroy what is left of Christian civilization and its high regard for the sacredness of every human life and the natural family is to spread the message of the gospel and to help reform and renew our currently badly compromised and complicit religious institutions. Moral and spiritual guides are crucially needed to show the way to true happiness and fulfillment in life for all people.
We want our readers to experience the same personal conversion and dramatic life changes that many of us have ourselves experienced. That is, we need to share our love for Christ with them.
Authentic, Christian spiritual renewal is the key to everything
Only if that happens can we really expect long-lasting, major transformation of our currently rapidly dying culture and a return to a culture of life. Authentic, Christian spiritual renewal is the key to everything and without that spiritual renewal our efforts are for naught. The blind will remain blind. The deaf will continue to not hear reason. The angry will continue to rage.
At Lifesite, we open every single meeting and every conference call with prayer. We have been doing that for several years now. Our day starts every morning with a staff prayer call during which we call upon God’s special help for our work, We ask our individual guardian angels to help us that day with inspirations. We pray for each other and for many special needs and intentions that any of us may have.
We pray for our enemies as Christ instructed us to do. We ask God for spiritual protection for our team members and their families and for LifeSite in general. After that we carry on with our tasks for the day with a constant spiritual perspective. We accept that without Him we can do nothing, achieve nothing.
In that way, we believe, we can achieve what would otherwise be humanly impossible. I urge all of you to do the same so that the awesome power of grace will propel us to not only protect the unborn and their troubled mothers but far more importantly – to transform the entire culture.
That transformation will result in all of our deepest wishes being granted in time. However, we must constantly remind ourselves that it is ultimately only God who does the transforming rather than our weak, faulty and limited selves. Therefore, we must fully depend on Him in all that we do and call upon Him before every task offering it up to Him for his greater glory.
