Colorado Catholic Bishops Call for Day of Prayer In Response to Planned Parenthood’s Acts of Abortion

Photo credit: Jamie Taylor, https://unsplash.com/@jamiehowardtaylor

By Deacon Frederick Bartels
28 August 2015

The Catholic bishops of Colorado are calling Catholics to a day of prayer in response to the unspeakably evil and horrific acts of Planned Parenthood (PP), the nation’s largest abortion provider. The Center for Medical Progress has issued reports detailing PPs practice of offering body parts of aborted babies to various entities or institutions for use by researchers.

A statement on the Colorado Catholic Conference website calls for prayer and reminds readers of the sacredness of human life: “We call on all people of good will in Colorado and beyond to pray that those involved in research and medicine will fix their sights on recognizing the sacredness of life and refrain from putting human life at the service of science. A society can only be considered socially just if it protects the most vulnerable among us”

Catholics and other Christians, as well as people of good-will, are deeply offended by PPs practice of offering body parts of aborted human children to researchers, but more than that, we are saddened and outraged by the act of abortion itself, which is nothing other than the intentional killing of an innocent human child. Whether a child is born or unborn, its status as a human person before God is unchanged: in each case the human person is comprised of body and soul, created in the image and likeness of God, whose human life is a priceless gift from the hands of the Creator himself, and whose creation by the loving goodness and wisdom of the Creator grants to him an inherent and inviolable right to life.

A society that intentionally kills its weakest members as a matter of convenience, seeing them as a burden to be discarded, or by pronouncing a death sentence on those whose future is deemed in some way questionable, is not a healthy society operating within God’s divine law and living in a fully human way, but rather is a society alienated from truth and goodness that has exchanged life for death, love for destruction and light for darkness, and has taken up into its own hands, in attacking innocent human life, the very means of destroying itself. The abortive society is a self-terminating society. In such a society, every human right is placed at risk as the strong assert their power over the lives of the weak in the most blatantly violent ways imaginable.

Let us enter fully into this day of prayer and penance in order to bring an end to the horrifying acts of abortion perpetrated by Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

Colorado Catholic bishops recommend the following as examples of prayer and penance:

• Attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion
• Meditating on the Word of God
• Spending time in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
• Praying the Holy Rosary
• Reciting the Chaplet of Divine Mercy
• Making the Way of the Cross
• Fasting and abstaining from eating meat

 

Let us pray,

O blessed and merciful Holy Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—come to the aid of our children, transform the hearts and minds of the people of this nation, and bring an end to these atrocities of unspeakable evil waged against human life wherever they occur, here in this nation and throughout the entire world. Replace hate with love, selfishness with selflessness, death with life, injustice with justice. Help us to live each day conscious of your immeasurable gift of human life that we all share as your human family, deeply drawn to you and unceasingly in love with you, that we may shine forth as lamps, radiating your own light to others and infusing society with your divine truth and love.

Amen.

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