Diocese of Toledo, Ohio

Browsing From the Pastor

Renewing Our Motivation to Safeguard the Lives of All Persons, Including the Unborn

   The Masses for this weekend are being celebrated between two significant national observances: the March for Life in Washington, D.C. and the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, which is to occur on Monday, January 22nd

   The struggle to protect the lives of unborn children is on-going and uphill. To renew and increase our own zeal to safeguard human life from the moment of conception until the time of natural death, we each need to appreciate the value and worth of our own lives.

   We live in a world that is highly impersonal. Many of us experience this as we try to make contact in regard to a good or service that we want to purchase. We call a certain company or firm and we are greeted by a recorded message on an answering machine. We have to press a number of times until we finally arrive at a level at which we can get the information that we are seeking. Even at this level, we sometimes do not have the option of speaking with a “live person” at the other end of the line.

   In addition to living in a world that is highly impersonal, human beings are often valued on a functional basis. Persons are often valued because of our so-called “usefulness” or for the potential that we have for being productive. Perhaps, at times, we feel this way about ourselves. We can be down on ourselves because, in our own eyes, our accomplishments seem small and insignificant when we see these in relation to the achievements of others.

   In our highly impersonal, function-based world, the Lord invites each of us to see ourselves first and foremost in relation to Himself and then in relation to others in His Name. As we do this, we will appreciate about ourselves that we are each far more important than the sum total of what we do. We each have infinite value because we’ve been created by God and have been redeemed by the Sufferings, Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are each a unique work of the Lord. 

   As individuals, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. They are the indispensable means in and through which the soul of each person expresses and communicates itself. As we take this biblical truth about ourselves to heart, we will want to avoid doing that which would hurt the unique temple of the Holy Spirit that we each are. At the same time, we will want to invite the Lord to help us to channel the desires and needs of our bodies in ways which are in accord with what He wants of us.

   As we see ourselves first and foremost in relation to the Lord, we will grow in the awareness of the communal nature of our identity. We belong to the Lord as members of that faith community that we call the Church. The Lord wants us to invite as many persons as we can to become one with us in that faith community in which He offers Himself to us in distinctive ways.

   We live in a world in which many have lost or have never experienced the communal nature of our identity as persons. In a setting in which more and more persons are not experiencing that sense of connectedness that Christ has gained for all persons, the climate is very rife for devaluing ourselves and the lives of other persons, especially individuals who live with highly challenging circumstances.

   I pray that each of us will want to see ourselves as the Lord wants this to happen. As we grow in the ability to value ourselves individually as temples of the Holy Spirit and to embrace our communal nature with all persons in Christ, we will appreciate the precious nature of the gift of life for ourselves. We will thus have the energy and the strength that are needed to work to protect the life of every other person, both the born and the unborn.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Fr. Nelson Beaver – Pastor  

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