Victory Is Sure for All Who Love

In 1990, I had the privilege of attending the second Worldwide Encounter for Priests in Rome. One of my fellow participants was an Australian priest who had spent most of his active ministry in the Highlands of Peru. One night on a dark bus coming back from the sessions to our hotel, he began to tell the story of why he was on sabbatical. In the previous year, all through Lent, he had prepared an astonishing number of people to receive the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and First Holy Communion as they were received into the Church along with blessing a number of marriages. With a gathering of villages, they had celebrated all of Holy Week and they had a triumphant Easter which culminated with an Easter Vigil that finished at dawn. After that, the fiesta began. He was exhausted and went off to a local village to sleep. After about 12 hours, his villagers came to fetch him back to the main village which had just been attacked by the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas. They had rounded up the catechists and beheaded them. They shot some villagers and kidnapped others. The priest returned to a scene of complete and total devastation. On that darkened bus in Rome, in his quiet but intense voice he said, “Yes, we went through the incredible time of Holy Week, the time of Passion of our Lord, and a time of the great celebration and revival of hope. All of a sudden we were back into the Passion.”

You may feel that the pro-life struggle is often like that. We celebrate the victories such as the reversal of the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision and then come crashing back to earth with the realities of new battles. This is the reality of our Christian life. Every saint has to struggle to come closer to the Lord. To grow deeper in the love, the light, and the truth of Christ, we have our Easters. These are times not just to celebrate but also times to hold on to the reality and the knowledge that celebration of the Christian life is not something that once done is just over. Yes we continue to struggle, but eternal victory is won. We work on a natural level, but the battle is always spiritual. When I look at our beautiful Easter window on the east side of our Cathedral in Peterborough, as the dawn breaks, the light bursts through. You see the visual power of Christ’s Resurrection. Hold fast to that!

We hold fast to it because we need to know that Christ is truly with us; that we do not battle alone. There are limited successes in this world because all things are limited in this world. But we will never be limited in the certainty of the spiritual battle. There are victories like the surprise victory in the Supreme Court in Alabama that declared preborn embryos to be human beings and the voices in the media who will speak up against the insanity of the mercy killing regime here in Canada. The battles are still ahead of us and that means that Christ’s victory must continue to be won. I want to encourage you to continue to teach. I want you to continue to hold fast, to speak, to act, to stand publicly, and to hold to the certainty of our faith. In this Year of the Sacred Heart, let us remember that grace is given to us through the power of the Love of Christ which conquers all things destroying even death itself.

Fr. Tom Lynch (PFLC National President)