The Grandeur of God
We are called to remain faithful even when we don’t experience success. I think of many prayers, alive and deceased, who for the past twenty years publicly sowed countless prayers for life outside of abortion mills in our country and around the World but did not see visible results. Today there are many signs indicating God seems to allow us to reap a new harvest of life. What are these signs? In the Western world all the countries including the United States, fell below the replacement level of 2.1 However the birth rate in the United States keeps going up, so that we are back at replacement level. At the same time, fewer politicians, publicly proclaim abortion to be something positive, especially with the polls showing the majority of Americans are now pro-life. In New York City, twenty years ago, more than 115,000 abortions were performed annually It is now down to 80,000 a year. With a drop off of at least 35,000 abortions each year, obviously, in New York City, abortion ‘clinics’ large, like Eastern Women’s, and small, like the Court Street clinic, keep closing. In the early 90’s Ellen Soppe asked me to assist her, Frank Samoylo, Therese Bierne and others to start the Helpers in Rockland County. Recently Father Frank Samoylo offered a Helpers’ Mass of Thanksgiving, with the closing of the sixth and final abortion mill in Rockland County.Source : http://www.helpersny.org/news6.htm
For more than fifteen years, the Helpers prayed and counseled outside the 12 abortion mills in Dallas, Texas. With the recent closing of the abortion mill, Aaron Women’s Health Center, there are only four left in Dallas. After more than fourteen years of the Helpers praying outside the abortion mill in Camperdown, Sydney, Australia, it closed. After many years of Helpers Prayer Vigils, three of the five public hospitals in the City of Bratislava, Slovakia, have stopped abortions. We must persevere and keep praying in this culture of death with the hope of seeing again the culture of life by remembering the lines expressed by the English Bard, Gerard Manley Hopkins, when he wrote: “The World is charged with the grandeur of God It will flame out, like shinning from shook foil:..Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;…And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs …Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.”
The Helpers apostolate in Ottawa is itself the fruit of the prayers of others. A small but dedicated group of people have already been maintaining a prayerful presence not only at the Bank St. abortuary, but also at the Civic Hospital. They've been at it for years, long before the first 40 Days for Life campaign in the fall of 2008. Let us now join with them and by multiplying their prayers continue to bring the Gospel of Life to those who are broken by this culture of death. We'll be surprised in turn at the fruit of our prayers.
