President Obama has just wrapped up his National Prayer Breakfast speech. He is presenting the U.S. as a beacon for religious freedom around the world, and vows to continue to protect it.
Yesterday, EWTN, founded by Mother Angelica – a cloistered nun and trailblazer woman in media — was in federal court seeking religious-freedom protection from his administration’s Health and Human Services abortion-drug, contraception, female sterilization mandate.
The president of the United States then went on to talk about love – and that we should not just pay lips service to it — “not just words, but deeds” – and I can’t help but hear Mother Teresa in the background, from her 1994 speech at the annual breakfast:
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on. Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today – abortion which brings people to such blindness.
And for this I appeal in India and I appeal everywhere – “Let us bring the child back.” The child is God’s gift to the family. Each child is created in the special image and likeness of God for greater things – to love and to be loved. In this year of the family we must bring the child back to the center of our care and concern. This is the only way that our world can survive because our children are the only hope for the future. As older people are called to God, only their children can take their places.
But what does God say to us? He says: “Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand.” We are carved in the palm of His hand; that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God from conception and is called by God to love and to be loved, not only now in this life, but forever. God can never forget us.
I will tell you something beautiful. We are fighting abortion by adoption – by care of the mother and adoption for her baby. We have saved thousands of lives. We have sent word to the clinics, to the hospitals and police stations: “Please don’t destroy the child; we will take the child.” So we always have someone tell the mothers in trouble: “Come, we will take care of you, we will get a home for your child.” And we have a tremendous demand from couples who cannot have a child – but I never give a child to a couple who have done something not to have a child. Jesus said. “Anyone who receives a child in my name, receives me.” By adopting a child, these couples receive Jesus but, by aborting a child, a couple refuses to receive Jesus.
Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.
From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3000 children from abortion. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents and have grown up so full of love and joy.
Earlier in the breakfast today, NASCAR’s Darrell Waltrip talked about the dangers of believing you’re a good guy when you’re really on the road to hell. He was speaking to the radical mandates of Christianity. They’re not about feeling good about yourself but being radically conformed to God, an ongoing journey, the purpose of our lives.
Religion isn’t merely a safe harbor in a storm, for private use only, confined to an hour on Saturday or Sunday, or for conveniently quoting in speeches, but the challenge of our lives.
And believers living by the Book are people we need. They care for others. They look out for their neighbors. They lead movements against injustice and unjust laws. They challenge others. They do hard work. They are about more than a political platform. They seek to be all about God, all about love and truth.
I believe President Obama believes he defends religious freedom. In listening to him today — talk about the wisdom of the Founders in making sure we never mandate a religion — he prompts what should be a nationwide examination of conscience: When does ideology become religion? The current administration doesn’t see how sexual revolutionary ideology has become a religion and that a tyrannical impulse mandates we worship at its temple. (Just ask Gordon College. Just ask the Little Sisters of the Poor. Just ask the Green and Hahn families who had to go to the Supreme Court.)
Watch Mother Teresa’s prayer breakfast speech here. Peggy Noonan wrote about the woman next to her writing a to-do list during it. Getting real about protecting religious freedom — and being real about lived faith, if you so choose, if you claim to believe in God, as most Americans do — should make it on the to-do list already.