ENDING ABORTION: NOT JUST FIGHTING IT

by Fr. Frank Pavone

Catholic Book Publishing Co., 2006

223 pages, $9.95

To order: catholicbookpublishing.com

1-973-890-2400

Catholics make up one-quarter of the U.S. population. If you won the 12 states where the most Catholics live, you’d be president. They form the single largest denomination in the House of Representatives, and a Catholic is the speaker of the house. They have a critical ally in an evangelical president. They constitute a majority of Supreme Court justices.

And yet abortion mills continue killing at least 1 million babies a year, as they have for each of the last 34 years.

We call a Supreme Court decision declaring there is no Constitutional right to puncture the head of a baby with scissors during birth “progress.” We hope the 2008 elections will, at best, sustain the status quo.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Father Frank Pavone would answer: the culture. We keep trying to make abortion illegal —which is good — but we also have to make it heinous. We need to rebuild a sense not only of the wrongness of abortion but its horror.

We need “a culture ... in which abortion is not only illegal but unthinkable. We can bring society to the point where, both in theory and practice, it regards abortion as it regards slavery today.”

With the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade upon us, Father Pavone’s easy-to-read, meditative book is worth revisiting. Organizing each idea in a pithy, self-contained reflection that never exceeds two pages, the author challenges readers to act as if they really believed that every 23 seconds a human being, a fellow American, is dissected, vacuumed to pieces, pickled or otherwise dealt an excruciating death in the name of “choice.”

“It is not enough to refrain from doing such things; we must create a society in which nobody feels free to do them.”

How do we achieve that?

Father Pavone’s advice is always concrete and practical. He insists that great things can be achieved through little steps — steps like putting a pro-life bumper sticker on your car, using pro-life checks, helping a pregnancy counseling center. And voting pro-life.

The director of Priests for Life also tries to encourage his fellow priests: Preach a pro-life sermon. It won’t endanger the Church’s tax-exempt status. “We in the Church grossly underestimate and under-utilize the power of the pro-life message to confront and transform our culture,” he writes.

He provides a chapter of wonderful pro-life meditations, keyed to various observances during the liturgical and civil years. Isn’t Advent, with John the Baptist leaping in the womb, a time to talk pro-life? Christmas, when Jesus identified himself with all of humanity, including the unborn? Lent, a time to turn from death to life?

My favorite meditations concern his thoughts on the Blessed Sacrament. If the Eucharist is “the source and summit” of the Christian life, then abortion is its radical antithesis. “‘This is my body.’ Same words, different results. Christ gives his body away so others might live; abortion supporters cling to their own bodies so others might die. In giving his body, Christ teaches the meaning of love: I sacrifice myself for the good of the other person. Abortion teaches the opposite of love: I sacrifice the other person for the good of myself!”

Not that Father Pavone wants to be judgmental. He writes on several occasions about the conversion of Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade used by the abortionists to concoct their “case.”

He urges pro-lifers to reach out to their opponents, not to defeat but to convert them, pointedly discussing the ministry of the “Centurions,” a group of former abortionists who have “abandoned that practice and now embrace the sanctity of life.” Without pulling punches, Father Pavone constantly tries to see the positive in people while stressing the perversity of abortion.

A wealth of information, solid, practical advice, and good resources (including the Priests for Life website, priestsforlife.org), this book is a real wake-up call to energize Catholics in their pro-life commitments.

It deserves wide readership among lay Catholics, a place in every rectory and serious meditation by the U.S. bishops.

John M. Grondelski writes from

Washington, D.C.