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Father William Kosko, Pastor of St. Henry’s Parish, Buckeye, ArizonaJohn Bering / YouTube

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BUCKEYE, Arizona, February 12, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – A Catholic parish priest in Arizona delivered a blistering homily against abortion to his parishioners on Sunday, telling them “if you are pro-abortion, I am tempted to ask you to leave St. Henry parish. Leave this parish.”

After a brief disclaimer about the gruesome nature of some of what he was about to say in his homily, Father William Kosko, Pastor of St. Henry’s Parish, Buckeye, AZ, launched into a story about a time when he was with the U.S. Peace Corps, attending a conference in Krakow, Poland. 

Being in Krakow, they were only around 47 miles from Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. Accordingly, the group made the two-hour excursion to the infamous extermination camp, to visit the museum and see what remained of the camp itself.

Upon witnessing the horrific history of the camp, Kosko explained that the group were unable to fathom how people in the neighboring town of Auschwitz, who undoubtedly knew what was happening just a few miles away, could tolerate such proximate evil.

“They say that one July it snowed there in that town, that snow fell from the sky. But it wasn't snow, it was the ashes from the crematoriums that were working overtime burning the bodies of the murdered dead.”

“How could people have tolerated this who knew about it?” “Surely they saw the train boxcars going in with people on them and the people not coming back.”

“Brothers and sisters,” he continued, “it's thirty years later and it's still snowing outside. It's snowing with the ashes of the innocent unborn.”

Kosko emphasized that “more of them [preborn babies] are being killed every year in the United States of America than the death camp of Auschwitz killed in its entire five-year history. Every year, after year, after year.”

Despite this, “we've just elected a Catholic president who is diametrically opposed to all of the basic moral principles proclaimed by the Roman Catholic Church. Not only abortion and the sanctity of human life, but the sanctity of marriage and this gender silliness.”

Given that Biden claims to be a Catholic, Kosko blames the U.S. bishops for his political successes as well as the advance of the pro-abortion cause, since those bishops “have been silent for 60 years through bad catechesis and cowardice.” Except for “a few papers here and there,” they have done little to halt the current situation of nearly 1 million babies being killed through abortion each year.

Kosko compared his anger at this situation with Jesus in the temple: “He didn't hate those people, but He was outraged with a sense of righteous anger.”

Explaining what his righteous anger must motivate, he said “I have to stand up for this, Jesus had to stand up for His Father's dignity, so He wanted a clean house and I have this righteous anger … I'll probably get my butt kicked but it's the right thing to do.”

“Woe to me if I don't preach the Gospel.”

Kosko addressed pro-abortion Catholics directly, asking how they could possibly reconcile their position with the Faith. “This is the Catholic Church, the Holy Catholic Church of God that teaches this [total opposition to abortion]. What parish would accept your views?”

“Sadly, you would find one and that is an indictment against the bishops,” Kosko lamented.

Kosko promised that if Biden were ever to attend Mass at his parish, he would refuse him Holy Communion. “Over my dead body. Not until he repents; he's a public figure, he needs to publicly repent and we need to pray for his conversion.”

The firmly anti-abortion priest compared the predicament of pastors who are trying to preach pro-life ethics to pro-abortion Catholics with a “university professor of literature who wants to teach you about Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or any other great literature, but about half the class doesn't even know how to read or write.”

“How in the world can I teach you about the beauty and the truths that lay hidden within Shakespeare when you can't even read it?”

Decrying the futility of such a pursuit, Kosko clarified that the teacher must “go back to kindergarten in first grade to start all over,” before explaining that “it's the same thing with this issue on life.”

Kosko instructed the faithful that the basic ethic of life is that “God's the author of life, we have no right to mess with that life, to play with it, let alone end it because of some reason under the sun that it just doesn't fit us.”

Knowing God exists and that life is everlasting is not enough for Catholics, Kosko said, since even “Lucifer can stand up here and say, because he does, he believes that there is one God.”

“He knows that. He can say almost the entire creed with us, so big deal that you can say it. Not impressed.”

In a final cri de cœur, the priest begged the congregation to “just say yeah, life is sacred.” 

“If we could just believe that,” Kosko remarked, then he believes we would be some way towards ending abortion, “but we got to believe that first.”