It was a day like any other day. The sun came up right on time. The sky was a deep blue and everyone seemed in a good mood. Buses and subways were filled with commuters making their way to jobs in the city. The morning news shows were their usual mix of news, sports, and celebrity gossip. It was just another day in America—or so we thought. Then, in the space of just a few hours, thousands of Americans were brutally murdered. Innocent people, killed without a chance to plead for their lives. One minute, full of life and and hope and the promise of tomorrow and the next moment—a horrible and violent death. Innocent lives, lost forever. And all of us are diminished by their loss.No, I’m not describing 9/11, although the scenario is much the same. I’m describing every single day in America. Because every day in our country 3700 Americans are violently killed by abortion. It’s 9/11 every day here, in the greatest country on the face of the earth. We’re not under attack by Al Qaeda or terrorists from Saudi Arabia or Somalia. It’s not an organized sleeper cell that’s killing us, but a culture of death that we’ve allowed to infiltrate our land. We’ve invited them in and given them a home and protected them by our Supreme Court rulings. And we wonder what’s wrong with the country we love. We wonder how we’ve gotten so off-track. We wonder why families are disintegrating and why half of all marriages end in divorce. We’re puzzled when we read statistics about adultery and abandonment. We shake our heads at stories of child abuse or wife abuse. We’re shocked to hear that the elderly are neglected or mistreated in their nursing homes. And we allow the treasure of our hearts, of our very lives—our children—to be destroyed each and every day by abortion. Can’t we see the connection between these murders and the state of our American families?
Our country is like a beautiful apple that is lovely to look at and admire, but is rotten at the core. Death lives at the heart of America and we all must take responsibility for that. We’ve forgotten the values we were founded on which placed God and the gift of life as our anchor and our morning star. We’ve allowed what is easy to replace what is right. We need an awakening in our land and in our hearts. We must remember how we all felt that on that September morning—remember the horror and the shock and the outrage. Remember how it felt to know that so many thousands of our fellow Americans—innocent people—had been murdered so senselessly and were now lost forever. That’s the horror of abortion every day in the greatest country on earth. We’re in the midst of another election season. Please pray that our President and the political leaders of our country will protect human life from conception until natural death. And pray that God will have mercy on us all.
“America you are beautiful . . . and blessed . . . . The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless. If you want equal justice for all and true freedom and lasting peace, then America, defend life.” – Pope John Paul II (1920-2005)
