Committee on Pro-Life Activities 3211 FOURTH STREET NE WASHINGTON DC 20017-1194 202-541-3070 FAX 202-541-3054 E-MAIL: [email protected] WWW.USCCB.ORG/PROLIFE RESPECT LIFE MONTH STATEMENT October 2024 Most Reverend Michael F. Burbidge Chairman, USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities We are living in an exciting time of revival. Our National Eucharistic Congress, and the Eucharistic processions that led to it, involved hundreds of thousands of Catholics who will never be the same. The revival continues, and is so needed, especially in our efforts to defend human life. Jesus, truly present in the Eucharist, gives us the fullness of life. He calls each of us to respect that gift of life in every person. While we live in a society that often rejects those who are weak, fragile, or vulnerable, they are most in need of our care and protection. Pope Francis remind us that “every child who, rather than being born, is condemned unjustly to being aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ, bears the face of the Lord, who even before he was born, and then just after birth, experienced the world’s rejection.”1 The law and millions of our brothers and sisters have yet to recognize this reality. We thankfully no longer live under the regime of Roe v. Wade, and our elected officials are now empowered to reduce or end abortion. But what we now see is that fifty years of virtually unlimited abortion has tragically created a a national mindset where many Americans have become comfortable with some amount of abortion. This allows the abortion industry to continue to provide any amount of abortion. Given this challenge, the U.S. bishops have affirmed that , while it is important to address all the ways in which human life is threated, “abortion remains our pre-eminent priority as it directly attacks our most vulnerable brothers and sisters, destroying more than a million lives each year in our country alone.” 2 In a tragic way, abortion has become the pre-eminent priority for others as well. We see many politicians celebrating the destruction of preborn children, and protecting access to abortion, even up until the moment of birth. Few leaders are standing up to limit the harm of chemical abortion (abortion pills) to mothers and children., which is now themost common form of abortion. And heading into the November elections, as many as ten states face gravely evil aballot initiatives that would enshrine abortion in their state constitutions. Pope St. John Paull II’s words resonate today: “we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life’… we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.”3 And so we need a revival of prayer and action:
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