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Bishop Chaput has asked that a letter from him to you be read at every parish in the Archdiocese, so I’d like to begin by reading the letter, then my homily will be based on this.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, January 22, 1998 marks the twenty fifth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. This Supreme Court decision ended the long tradition that the unborn child’s life is protected under the United States Constitution. In doing so, it has led to the killing of more than thirty five million unborn children since 1973. Millions of women and men have had their lives for ever changed by the abortion decision, I’m speaking now to those persons who have had abortions or cooperated in abortions and are now in need of reconciliation with God, please heed the words of Pope John Paul II: "The wound in your heart might not have healed; certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong, but do not give into discouragement and do not lose hope, know without a doubt that you are loved by your Church, this is your home."
Our country has been irrevocably changed since Roe vs. Wade. The state of Oregon has legalized physician assisted suicide. In Colorado, during this legislative session, a bill will be introduced to do the same. I therefore ask you to take very seriously the wider impact of the Roe vs. Wade decision. Please continue your fight to protect the most vulnerable in our society. This month, Bishops throughout the United States including myself are asking our parishioners to make your voices heard in the public arena. We are asking you to tell your US Senators that you want a ban on partial birth abortion. This procedure is particularly gruesome, for it literally kills a child in the womb who is fully or nearly fully formed. Conducted in the final months of pregnancy, partial birth abortion requires the unborn child’s skull to be crushed before delivery. It is no exaggeration to call it infanticide. Your postcards in the past two years have generated the votes in both, the US House and Senate to ban this procedure, the obstacle has been president Clinton. He has consistently vetoed the bill. In the spring of this year a vote on this issue will again be taken in Congress. We have enough votes in the House of Representatives to override the president’s veto. We lack only three votes in the US Senate to do the same. You will be asked to sign a postcard to our Colorado Senators Wayne Allard and Ben Nighthorse Campbell next weekend January 24 and 25 In your parish, urging them to override. Also a card to your state representative and senator will be available for your signature. I ask you to sign and mail these cards to show that Colorado Catholics support the sanctity of human life. Later this week I will be writing in greater depth on the meaning of Roe’s 25th anniversary in the Denver Catholic Register; meanwhile I ask you to pray in a special way that God will guide our Federal Legislators to vote in defense of human life.
May God strengthen and bless you all.
 

In the Holy Gospel there is the wonderful story of our Lord and the Blessed Mother going to the wedding feast of Cana, and our Lord there performs His first miracle at the words and bidding of the Blessed Mother, who is always so attentive. It is the Blessed Mother alone who recognizes that the wine is nearly running out. She is the servant of God, the servant of her Divine Son, and so she is very attentive when people are in any need whatsoever. She notices that the wine, which is a symbol of joy is running out; and so she says to her Son: "They have no more wine, they have no more joy". Although it’s not the Lord’s hour He does exactly what His Blessed Mother says. Why is that? Not just because she was a Jewish mother and all Jewish sons did what their mothers said, but because the mind and heart of Jesus and the Blessed Mother are the same. What the Blessed Mother’s heart is, that’s the heart of Jesus. What the mind of Jesus is, that’s the mind of the Blessed Mother. There really is no difference in the heart or mind, they both desire the glorification of the Father and the sanctification of mankind.
And so the Blessed Mother, who is always attentive, brings the needs of the wedding party to the attention of the Divine Lord. And let us you and I pray specially to the Blessed Mother the attentive servant of God, that she will bring to God the needs of our nation which are so great at this time.
Yesterday morning, about eight o’clock I took our seminarians and we went to the abortion clinic at 20th and Vine, and we prayed fifteen decades of the rosary as Catholics do every Saturday and even every weekday there. And as we were praying, there were ten young mothers who came into the abortion clinic. And the clinic is a particularly gray, small, shabby little building which is really in very poor repair. The doctor who works there most likely would get little work anywhere else, but because it’s abortion he is able to practice his ‘medicine’ in a way. And as we prayed the ten women came in to the abortion clinic and as we left we knew that they would leave soon following us, but in the leaving, they would have left behind their child, and that that morning ten children would be killed; and that same scene would take place in shabby, little, dirty clinics across our country to the tune of untold millions of children. At this point since 1973 thirty five million children have been killed in our abortion clinics, and our elderly will soon follow. As the Archbishop mentions, Oregon already has legally physician assisted suicide. The elderly will be particularly targeted in this, in the coming years, and the numbers will continue to grow. And those who have died at our hands, the numbers will continue to rise. And as their numbers rise the darkness will grow upon our country, with every life that is taken, the hope for our land will diminish. The promise of any kind of grace filled future diminishes with every passing day. As long as abortion continues, our hope continues to be extinguished.
When the sin is great, God’s punishment is always great. Because God needs to bring His beloved people back to their senses. And we indeed need to be brought back to our attention, to our senses.
The number thirty five million is just so great we cannot possibly wrap our minds around them. We know that Stalin killed thirty million people in the nineteen thirties in the collectivization efforts in the Soviet Union. We know that the lies and the violence of that regime a half a century later brought to an absolute end the Soviet Empire. It’s hard for you and I to imagine thirty million deaths, but more than that has died in our abortion clinics of United States. We call Stalin a butcher, and rightly so, for so he was. How many children have died in America’s abortion mills? More than the entire population of every living soul of the cities of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Dallas and Denver. Every living soul in those cities right now does not equal the number of abortions that have taken place in our land.
That the reality of abortion might become even clearer to us, I would ask all those who are twenty five years of age or younger to please stand. Everyone who is under twenty five years of age or under, please stand up. As I look, I see about sixty five young people. If abortion were not a fact in our country, there would be about over a hundred standing right now; for every two standing right there, there would be a third. We had five seminarians this morning at the nine o’clock Mass, we would’ve had seven if abortion were not a reality.
When you and I look around at our young people we recognize that one third of them are missing, they are our hope and our only future as a land. And so we beg God’s forgiveness for what we have done (Thank you all for standing).
My greatest fear for us now as a people in the United States is that you and I have grown numb at the face of so great an evil. When I look at my own mind and my own heart I cannot help but praying: "Dear Lord, why am I not more outraged? Dear Lord why am I not more horrified at the reality of abortion? Why am I not more sick to my stomach at the thought of partial birth abortion? Why am I not more revolted at what we are doing to our young, and increasingly to our elderly? Why doesn’t it make me sick to my stomach?" I suspect that like me, you are becoming numb to what is happening in our midst, and that is my greatest fear for all of us.
You see, in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930’s neighbors would disappear one after another and they would never be heard from again, and people grew used to this, and they began to think it was normal. In Hitler’s Germany, the stench from the smoke stacks of the concentration camps where human beings were incinerated was absolutely disgusting, but the people grew used to this smell, and they began to think it normal. My greatest fear is that you and I, who witness the untold millions of young children killed will increasingly think it normal and that we have nothing to say about it, and that it is not our business, and we will grow very tolerant of this monstrous evil in our midst. And then heaven help our souls. If we see not this evil before us and are revolted by it and pray for its end, heaven help our souls.
The US Bishops say this: "We recall what is best in our national heritage. Human beings, simply because they are human must be recognized as persons with fundamental human rights. Our nation fought a terrible civil war because the practice of slavery was fully recognized to be inconsistent with our national ethos enunciated in the declaration of independence. All are endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Slavery is repugnance because it treats human beings as property to be disposed of at the will of another. It was morally absurd then to ‘I am personally opposed to owning slaves and would never own any myself, but I can’t force my moral view on others’. It is just as morally repugnant to say the same about abortion today. Our nation stands in judgment now as it did more than a century ago. Are we to be a nation that honors its commitments to the rights to life or not? And if not just what does our nation stand for?
To our fellow Catholics we ask you now to do even more for life. Catholic families should be living symbols of our conviction that life is always, always a gift from God. Teach your children to respect human life from conception to natural death. Pray as a family for an end to this evil that destroys the weakest of the weak, the poorest of the poor.
And so you and I, I ask you to do two things; to participate in the car riding campaign and every day as a family to pray for and end to the horror of abortion, the darkness of which daily grips our country more and more. And let us ask the Lord to give us a hatred for abortion, let us ask the Lord to give us a love for all mothers who have had an abortion. Grant us the grace we pray oh Lord to come to You with perseverance for a speedy end the evil of abortion and the deadly darkness that has descended upon our land.
Let us you and I with great faith, call upon the Blessed Mother and pray: "Oh Blessed Mother, attentive to the needs of the young bride and groom, attentive to the fact that there was no joy, make us mindful of the terrible darkness that has come over our country and threatens to destroy our joy. Make us mindful of the uncounted millions who have died or will die in abortion’s shadow. Blessed Mother, intercede with your beloved Son for our poor country, we beg you, so covered in the blood of its children. Blessed Mother, servant of our Lord Jesus, bring our prayers before your Son, that we may be a people who return in love to your Son in respect for all human life, the Father’s greatest gift to us all.