The Oregon governor’s March 10 declaration of “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day” indicates “a return to humanity’s oldest, darkest impulse,” Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample wrote this week. He invited those who support abortion, or even celebrate it, to repent and turn to Christ for forgiveness.
Gov. Tina Kotek’s March 10 proclamation “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day” marks a moment, Archbishop Sample wrote, “when words fail. When the mind stares into the abyss and finds no bottom. When all that’s left is a kind of stunned silence — the kind you feel when you realize just how far a culture can drift from reality.”
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Celebrating the end of an unborn life goes much further than a mere moral confusion, he wrote.
“It’s something deeper,” he wrote. “A kind of spiritual blindness so thick that what should be self-evident — the sheer wonder and worth of a human life — is obscured entirely.”
The celebration of abortion indicates modern man has traded the wonder of life for the pursuit of power, he wrote.
“If a baby is inconvenient, it must go,” he continued. “If it interferes with autonomy, it must be sacrificed. A life is no longer a gift. It is an obstacle, a burden, a problem to be solved.”
Instead of seeing life as a miracle and gift, he wrote, modern culture reduces life to “a transaction. A commodity to be managed. And, when necessary, discarded.”
“That’s not progress. That’s collapse,” the archbishop stated. “A return to humanity’s oldest, darkest impulse: might makes right. But followers of Jesus have always stood in the way of that tide and simply said, No. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the ones with no power at all.”
The archbishop, however, ended on a note of hope. The Gospel invites people to repentance, he wrote, including those who have celebrated and profited from abortion as well as those who have convinced themselves it is a moral good.
Grace and forgiveness are always still available, he stated, and Christ’s call “is always the same: Repent. Open your eyes. Step out of the lie and into the light.”
Archbishop Sample emphasized that Christ calls all people to embrace life, both biologically and spiritually, celebrating its mystery and beauty.
“Because life — every life — is a gift,” he concluded. “And a world that forgets that is a world that has lost its soul.”
LifeNews Note: Grace Porto writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
