Pray with the March for Life

I've always been of two minds about this sort of thing.  Protesting is, of course, a protected right in our country.  As long as we behave and don't engage in violence or destruction or murder or such, I support anyone's right to protest, no matter how looney the cause. 

If it's a cause I support, I'm obviously more willing to support it.  When it comes to the March for Life, I became aware of it when I became a Christian.  That was my first real exposure to passionate opposition to abortion.  Naturally, as a godless youngster, I didn't care.  In fact, as I used to say there were no words more tender or lovely to hear than, "Don't worry, if I get pregnant, I'll just get an abortion."

So the zeal with which abortion was spoken of and condemned in my early church walk was an eye opener.  As a Protestant, I noticed that the Catholics were every bit the storm troopers when it came to fighting this good fight.  I also noticed the Catholics did a better job of linking abortion with other life oriented issues.

Not that Protestants didn't do that at all mind you.  Believe it or not, Protestants were about charity and helping the least of these.  Issues like gun control and the death penalty usually found differing views in any given congregation.  It was just a tendency for the churches I knew to sort of divide up the various life issues on a case by case basis.  Today abortion, tomorrow the soup kitchen.

I noticed Catholics tended to wrap thing up better, make them part of a larger fabric - a seamless garment dare I say?  There seemed to be a consistency that was somehow lacking in the Protestant approach.  Again, you could find Protestants who were all over the place on these various issues.  And perhaps it's that 'Protestant nature of things' that was the problem.  With Catholics, you knew where they stood.  At least officially. 

Naturally when I became Catholic, things like the March for Life blew up a thousand times larger in my awareness.  Across St. Blogs, everything seemed to come to a stop at this time of year.  It was like Christmas or Easter.  Whatever was going on, I knew I was in for endless posts lifting up the march, the marchers and praying for an end to this scourge of humanity that is our modern abortion culture.  And then, an abortion culture that exists only to sustain our drugs and sex culture as we blindly lumber through the AIDS pandemic. 

So I've come to see this as a nice reminder that 7000 have not taken a knee to Baal.  True, it's overall effectiveness may or may not be clear.  That's why I'm of two minds.  I hope we never think just getting out and marching will do it.  It took more than the March on Washington to get things done.  But then, even by that point, the winds of change were at the marchers' backs that day in Washington all those years ago.

Nonetheless, whichever the way the winds are blowing, here's praying that something can happen to turn the tide. I'm of the opinion that the national legalizing of unborn baby murder and the subsequent rise of the era of random, mass killings and push for a culture of suicide are not unrelated.  Anything that might help stem this culture of death in which we live is certainly worth a prayer or two.