I Look Awesome for 250: Can You Do Me Favor for Life? |
Sunday is my 50th birthday. I tell you that because I’m grateful for the gift of life. I may not always be the best steward of it, but I pray that every day I get better at it, with God’s grace and wisdom and discipline.
And I have a super practical reason to share this: I ask you to help me celebrate by making a donation to the Sisters of Life.
Many of you are aware of the sisters — women religious commonly known as “nuns” (that’s not an entirely accurate label, but it will do). They dedicate their lives to God with the usual vows a Catholic sister makes: poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their unique charism includes a fourth vow: to protect and enhance the sacredness of human life.
What does that look like? Well, first of all, prayer. They have Visitation Missions in New York, Toronto, Denver, Philadelphia, and Phoenix where they encounter women who are needing someone to love them as they are navigating and unplanned pregnancy. Some of them are abortion-minded. Some have the abortions. Others chose to give birth and raise their child. Some make an adoption plan. I met one 17-year-old a few years ago outside a Planned Parenthood who was coerced into an abortion, only to turn to the Sisters of Life the next time she got pregnant. She’s got a young son now.
Cardinal John O’Connor was given the inspiration for the Sisters of Life during a 1975 visit to Dachau. Here’s how he described the experience: “I placed my hand in the oven and felt the intermingled ashes of Jew and Christian, rabbi, priest and minister.” In horror, he prayed: “Good God, how could human beings do this to other human beings?”
He felt called to do whatever he could to protect the sacredness of human life for the rest of his days.
“My life was changed radically, not modestly, not fractionally but radically when I put my hand into the oven at Dachau. . . . I knew that with all my studies and all my degrees . . . up until that moment, I knew no real theology. I learned it at Dachau. The men and women who died at Dachau shaped my adult life.”
“For Cardinal O’Connor, it was always about the individual person — what he called the dazzling value, the infinite worth of a single soul made in the image and likeness of almighty God,” a reflection on the Sisters of Life website reads. “To him, it was not that 6 million Jews and 5 million Christians were killed in the holocaust — but that 1 person of infinite worth was killed, 11 million times and that God experienced........