His Will Be Done

Today is the forty-first anniversary of
Roe v. Wade, which effectively legalized abortion on demand. It’s
a time to look back and look ahead. The abortion struggle of the past four
decades teaches a very useful lesson. Evil talks a lot about “tolerance” when
it’s weak. When evil is strong, real tolerance gets pushed out the door. And
the reason is simple. Evil cannot bear the counter-witness of truth. It will
not coexist peacefully with goodness, because evil insists on being seen as
right, and
worshiped as being
right. Therefore, the good must be made to seem hateful and wrong.

The very existence of people who refuse to accept evil and who seek to
act virtuously burns the conscience of those who don’t. And so, quite
logically, people who march and lobby and speak out to defend the unborn child
will be—and are—reviled by leaders and media and abortion activists that turn
the right to kill an unborn child into a shrine to personal choice.

Seventy years ago, abortion was a crime against humanity. Four decades
ago, abortion supporters talked about the “tragedy” of abortion and the need to
make it safe and rare. Not anymore. Now abortion is not just a right, but a
right that claims positive dignity, the license to demonize its opponents and
the
precedence to interfere with
constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. We no
longer tolerate abortion. We venerate it as a totem.

People sometimes ask me if we can be optimistic, as believers, about the
future of our country. My answer is always the same. Optimism and pessimism are
equally dangerous for Christians because both God and the devil are full of
surprises. But the virtue of hope is another matter. The Church tells us we
must live in hope, and hope is a very different creature from optimism. The
great French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos defined hope as “despair
overcome.” Hope is the conviction that the sovereignty, the beauty, and the
glory of God remain despite all of our weaknesses and all of our failures. Hope
is the grace to trust that God
is who he claims to be, and that in serving him, we do something fertile and
precious for the renewal of the world.

Our lives matter to the degree that we give them away to serve God and
to help other people. Our lives matter
not
because of who we are. They matter because of who God is. His mercy, his
justice, his love—these are the things that move the galaxies and reach into
the womb to touch the unborn child with the grandeur of being human. And we
become more human ourselves by seeing the humanity in the poor, the weak, and
the unborn child and then fighting for it.

Over the past forty-one years, the prolife movement has been written off
as dying too many times to count. Yet here we are, again and again,
disappointing our critics and refusing to die. And why is that? It’s because
the Word of God and the works of God do not pass away. No court decision, no
law, and no political lobby can ever change the truth about when human life
begins and the sanctity that God attaches to each and every human life.

The truth about the dignity of the human person is burned into our
hearts by the fire of God’s love. And we can only deal with the heat of that
love in two ways. We can turn our hearts to stone. Or we can make our hearts
and our witness a source of light for the world. Those of you here today have
already made your choice. It’s a wonderful irony that despite the cold and snow
of January, there’s no such thing as winter in this great church. This is God’s
house. In
this place, there’s only the
warmth of God’s presence and God’s people. In
this place, there’s no room for fear or confusion or
despair, because God never abandons his people, and
God’s love always
wins.

We are each of us created and chosen by God for a purpose, just as David
was chosen; which is why the words of the Psalmist speak to every one of us
here today:

Oh God, I will sing a new song to you;

With a ten-stringed lyre I will chant your praise,

You who give victory to kings,

And deliver David, your servant from the sword.

The Psalmist wrote those words not in some magic time of peace and
bliss, but in the midst of the Jewish people’s struggle to survive and stay
faithful to God’s covenant surrounded by enemies and divided internally among
themselves. That’s the kind of moment we find ourselves in today. All of us are
here because we love our country and want it to embody in law and in practice
the highest ideals of its founding. But nations are born and thrive, and then
decline and die. And so will ours. Even a good Caesar is still only Caesar. Only
Jesus Christ is Lord, and only God endures. Our job is to work as hard as we
can, as joyfully as we can, for as long as we can to encourage a reverence for
human life in our country and to protect the sanctity of the human person,
beginning with the unborn child.

We also have one other duty: to live in hope; to trust that God sees the
weakness of the vain and powerful, and the strength of the pure and weak. The
reading from Samuel today reminds us that David cut down the warrior Goliath
with a sling and a smooth, simple stone from the wadi. And what I see here
before me today are not “five smooth stones from the wadi” but hundreds and
hundreds of them. Our job is to slay the sin of abortion and to win back the
women and men who are captive to the culture of violence it creates. In the
long run,
right makes might, not the
other way around. In the long run, life is stronger than death, and your
courage, your endurance, your compassion even for those who revile you, serves
the God of life.

The Gospel today tells us that Jesus has power over illness and
deformity. But even more radically, it reminds us that Jesus is the Lord of the
sabbath itself—the one day set aside every week to honor the Author of all
creation. The sabbath is for man, as Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel, not
man for the sabbath. In like manner, the state and its courts and its laws were
made for man, not man for the state. The human person is the subject of life
and the subject of history; immortal and infinitely precious in the eyes of
God; not an accident of chemistry, not a bit player, and not a soulless object
to be affirmed or disposed of at the whim of the powerful or selfish.

If Jesus is the lord of the sabbath, he is also the lord of history. And
sooner or later, despite the weaknesses of his friends and the strengths of his
enemies, his will
will be done—whether
the Pharisees and Herodians of our day approve of it or not.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is archbishop of Philadelphia. 

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