I forgot to post some pictures I took at the Life Issues Forum I spoke at the other week at St. Anne’s Catholic church in Warsaw Missouri. Our diocesan pro-life committee travels around the diocese organizing these forums to keep parishioners up to date on life issues, especially those which concern our state. In this picture, Dr. Lankford, from Mexico Missouri is explaining partial birth abortion. He always brings fetal development models and actual abortion tools to describe the various kinds of abortion procedures. The PBA example inevitably causes the audience to cringe, to which he says, “yes, it’s brutal, but that’s what they’re doing!” Dr. Lankford is a medical doctor, I believe, though I forget his actual practice. He said he got involved in the pro-life movement, not only because of how harmful it is to the children, but also the harmful effect he has seen it have on the women.

Also on hand for the afternoon was Rev. Mr. Larry Webber, the executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, who talked about pro-life legislation. You can read about some of that here. Before I got there, Fr. Phil Niekamp discussed the Theology of the Body and later I offered my own thoughts on the subject – from a “young person’s” perspective. The gist of what I said was that, after attending Ave Maria University a few years ago, I saw a lot of young people soaking in and living this important theological teaching. The opposite of love is not hate, as Christopher West often explains in his TOB talks, but use. Young people (and really all people in general) have an innate desire to be loved, and they know that it is beneath their human dignity to be an object for another person’s physical gratification. TOB answers every person’s desire for love and their unique call to love as God loves.

I really enjoyed the church of St. Anne, and I was most impressed with their great witness for life. They have a couple of memorials for the unborn on their property and worked to get one in two of the main cemeteries in their town. As you approach the church you can see the unborn memorial crosses facing the street and further into the parking lot is a concrete monument declaring: “We as a people are dedicated to preserving all forms of human life conceived in His image.”

My favorite, however, was a picture hung up inside the church with the hands of our Lord reaching out to the hands of a little child. I can’t quite remember what the little plaque underneath says exactly. It’s something like, “God said unto one of his angels, Go and get the unborn who are not wanted, and the children of the earth whose time it is to come home. Bring them home to me.” I’ve never seen anything like it before.