Through a special initiative of Priests for Life, the nation's 19,000+ Catholic parishes have now been "matched" to the nation's remaining 700+ freestanding abortion mills. Each parish is asked to pray and work for the conversion and closing of a specific killing center.
This project applies the spiritual power of the Church against the deadly power of the abortion industry. Obviously, we pray and work for an end to abortion throughout the nation. But abortion happens in specific, local abortion mills, and that's where it is most easily stopped.
This effort helps to focus and channel the energies of God's people in the pro-life battle. It provides simple ways that everyone in the parish -- whether young or old, healthy or sick, mobile or homebound -- can direct their prayers for an end to abortionThe success of the project, furthermore, is quite measurable.
The project is a form of "spiritual adoption," by which the entire parish, as a community, "adopts" the abortion mill, all the babies who are brought there, the mothers and fathers, the employees and volunteers, and all who help the mill to function. A special prayer has been composed for this purpose, and can be found, along with the listing of parishes and mills, at www.priestsforlife.org/mills. (If local circumstances make it seem advisable, the parish may change which abortion mill it focuses upon.)
The project aims not only for the closing of the mill, but for the conversion of all who help it to function, so that they never try to start another one.
The spiritual battle inherent in this project should not be underestimated. One former abortion mill security guard said to a pro-life leader that the mill was "a church -- a place of worship." Ginette Paris, a pro-abortion author, actually wrote a book called "The Sacrament of Abortion," calling this procedure a sacred sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. Some have bumper stickers that say, "Abortion is a woman's rite," and it is no secret that witchcraft is sometimes carried out inside abortion clinics. The lining up of the parishes with the mills is a face-off between the false church and the true Church; between the false god, who transforms suffering into violence, and the true God, who transforms violence into suffering; between the innocent blood of babies that cries out for vengeance, and the innocent Blood of Christ that cries out for mercy; between those who make a covenant with death, saying "This is my body, even if the baby dies," and those who renew the everlasting covenant of Life, saying, "This is My Body, given up for you, that you may live forever."
Our Lord told us that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. It is the Church that takes the initiative, storming the gates of sin with the power of grace, the gates of falsehood with the power of truth, and the gates of death with the power of life. And the gates will not stand.