Each year the Church presents us with a cycle of readings to proclaim the Good News. If we are honest, however, its not an easy thing to preach from these same readings year after year. That is especially the case for those of you who may be in the same parish or even preaching to the same internet or television congregation. We are not all like Thomas Merton who in the last chapter of his famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, recounted the joy of going through the Church year and looked forward to repeating it, not just here on earth, but in the world to come.

The same must be said when one is preaching on prolife issues. Sometimes people will say, “Oh, not abortion again.” Or, “All that talk about mercy killing or euthanasia is overblown. Can’t Father find something else to talk about?” But there are a lot of good reasons why we have that cycle. And I would like to lay out seven.

1) The first is that this information will always be new to people until they are willing to confront it. The Culture Wars change rapidly and it is exactly when we are not paying attention or are not willing to engage in the battle that events rapidly turn to our disadvantage. We want to ignore hard things and with our current short attention spans that is not difficult to do, but it is always dangerous. Just look at the situation with the Ukraine and Crimea right now. If attention had been paid seven years ago, it is unlikely the current invasion would have happened.

2) There are always new facts in the prolife battle. Not just statistics, but also, a widening push, a general sense that the killing of the vulnerable is to be normalized and that all right-thinking people would have to agree with this. It was Neil Young who sang, “Rust never sleeps,” and neither does evil.

3) Each generation is new. Towards the end of a long life, my mother asked me why so many people did not know the devotions on which she had been nourished. I replied, “They had not been taught to us.” Knowledge about the realities about abortion and euthanasia have to be taught to each generation. We don’t neglect mathematics nor can we reject the top moral issues of our time.

4) There is always an urgency to the prolife reality. It was Cato the Elder in Imperial Rome, who ended each speech, regardless of his topic, with the inevitable, “Carthage must be destroyed.” At first seen as a figure of ridicule, he later became the conscience of the Roman people who (like Churchill almost two thousand years later) forced an entire nation to see the urgency and the necessity of facing reality. Ours are uncomfortable facts. Whether on the street or on media platforms, these facts must be faced.

5) The application of solutions is always new. It is no surprise that we live in a constantly accelerating world. And there must be new ways to deal with these problems. If an old way doesn’t work, drop it. If a tried and true method needs to be updated, update it. If someone had a new idea, try it. Our people need to know that there are new paths to victory.

6) Evil always wants to expand, but so does good. There has been expansion and changes in how abortion or mercy killing is being presented to our people, but there have also been initiatives, proposals and projects which have saved lives and been successful.

7) Yes, there is victory and there is defeat. There are lives lost, but there are also lives saved. One of the remarkable things about the material put out by the Sisters of Life is their sterling ability to use stories and photographs of women and children whose lives have been changed or even saved by the materials and donations supplied by their supporters. We need to use stories - stories not just of defeat and statistics, but also of successes that lift up the hearts and souls of our own people in this long running battle.

Finally, remember that this Easter and every Easter is both the culmination of the long story of God Himself intervening in our history and in your and my life to definitively overcome evil and announce His victory through the Resurrection. There is a Resurrection and we do not just celebrate it as a historical fact, but we celebrate it each and every time a life is saved, a sinner retrieved, and a soul won for Christ. Make this Easter the eternally new Easter in your heart, in your words, and in the lives of your people.

Fr. Tom Lynch (PFLC National President)