South Bend, Ind. — Stunning. Captivating. Innocent. Humble.
Andrew was clearly taken with the woman.
“She symbolizes so much, a resignation to His will, an utter awe and reverence for the beauty of life — regardless the circumstance — and she provides a voice for those without a voice.”
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The beauty got to him. Considering how often we can be attracted to that which is harmful to us, her pure beauty seemed to offer a loving protection.
The woman was Mary, the Mother of God, as she appeared to Juan Diego, in Mexico in 1531. Like so many young people, though raised Catholic, Andrew didn’t truly know what the Christian’s call to radical discipleship is. But Andrew credits Our Lady of Guadalupe with turning his head: She focused his attention on the richness of a life of chastity and integrity, and led him to service in Honduras as a lay missionary, and to the pro-life work he’s doing now in New York.
The late John Paul II knew she would capture lives like Andrew’s. He called the pregnant Mary, as she appeared in Guadalupe, the “Star of the New Evangelization.”
This effect could be seen in a penetrating way in South Bend, Ind., recently, where over 24 pro-life students, parents, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals took two weeks to work through how to be better defenders of the most innocent among us.
They convened for Project Guadalupe, the baby of the Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life, chaired by philosophy professor David Solomon. This June its inaugural Vitae Institute event was held, in which participants, with birthdays spanning five decades, were given a satchel of tools they may have been lacking. They walked away from two weeks of lectures and workshops and interaction and prayer seeing a fuller picture of the state of human dignity in America and the world, with classes in biology, philosophy, theology, law, psychology, and more. It was an opportunity to feed an intellectual and spiritual thirst and compare notes on how to be truly engaged, effective, and comprehensive. And an overarching — highlighted and underlined — reminder to always be loving, above all.
As Notre Dame alumnus Bill McGurn, a former presidential speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist, told the Vitae gathering: “We are not simply after the outlawing of abortion, though a law may be the result of our efforts . . . We stand for something much more difficult and far more consequential: an America that protects the unborn in law because she welcomes them in life.”
And where better to proclaim this, than under the twelve-foot-tall, 2,000-pound Mary atop the school’s golden dome?
As McGurn put it: “At times it might be tempting to think, ‘We are just one judge or one law away from getting what we want.’ At these moments, it’s important to recognize that the only secure defense for the unborn is persuading our fellow citizens of the dignity of each human life. That’s true of the unborn child, yes. But it’s true of the mother and father too — and it’s true even of the men and women who would abort that child.”
Persuading with love. Mercy and redemption start with an embrace. That’s the story former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson tells in her book Unplanned, about her journey to pro-life activism. She was horrified by participating in an ultrasound-guided abortion; and, over time, she was stirred by the loving kindness of pro-life activists she couldn’t help encountering as part of her daily life.
Pope Benedict XVI recently said: “The Gospel is the ever new proclamation of the salvation wrought by Christ to render humanity a participant in the mystery of God and in his life of love and to open it to a future of sure and strong hope. To underscore that at this moment in the history of the Church she is called to carry out a New Evangelization, means intensifying missionary action to correspond fully with the Lord’s mandate.”
Truly, Jenkins is an appalling fraud and a deceiver. But as Professor Charles Rice painfully documents in his terrific "What Happened to Notre Dame?", Jenkins is only a symptom, a weak heir to the one who destroyed Notre Dame as a Catholic institution -- Theodore Hesburgh -- and created in its place "a small Purdue with a golden dome".
How sadly papists fail to realize Mary would condemn them for their focus on her instead of her Son, failing to follow her example. Neither the Church or the pro-life movement will get anywhere until they repent of such manifest idolatry, no matter it's saction by long tradition the ancient fathers rejected for those who know true history versus papist revisionism.
As previously mentioned, many Jewish and Christian scholars agree that one should avoid use of the term "Pharisaical"--even about non-Jews--because its inaccurate stereotype tends to promote anti-Semitism. Similarly, use of the word "jesuitical" should be avoided because it tends to promote bias against Catholics and Jesuits. Likewise, the derogatory term "papist" should be avoided because it promotes anti-Catholicism. Russ Davis should also have avoided misspelling and bad punctuation for "no matter its sanction." And the last three lines by Davis do not communicate a clear point because of the strange grammatical construction.
The comment above about "papists" "focusing on her instead of her son" exposes this person's ignorance about the Catholic faith and highlights a common misunderstanding in the general population. Catholics do not worship Mary in place of Jesus. They revere her as His mother and recognize her place of honor next to Jesus often asking for her intercession through prayer. Certainly Jesus holds his mother in a special place in His heart. Catholics do not idolize or worship her. Worship is to Jesus alone.
When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing by, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then He said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour that
disciple took her to his own home.
The work of Project Guadalupe is wonderful. However, it will remain marginalized by Notre Dame until the university's administration denounces or, more realistically, distances itself from the deliberations of the Land o'Lakes Statement of 1967 through a wholehearted adherence to Ex Corde Ecclesiae...
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