Archpastoral Statement on the Annual March for Life 2006
A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud
lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled,because
they were no more.- (Matthew 2.18)
To the Beloved Clergy and Faithful of this God-Saved Diocese:
Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
Christos Raždajetsja! Slavite Jeho!
Dear Very Reverend and Reverend Fathers, Clergy and Faithful:
The National Right to Life March will be held on Monday, January 23, 2006 in
our nation's capital. It will be the 33rd March, since the Supreme Court
legislated a new law in the land in 1973, legalizing abortion on demand.
Once again, I urge you to fervently support the Pro-Life cause in prayer, in
service and in donations to local Pro-Life offices.
I especially urge you to participate in the March for Life. Plan to ride one
of the many hundreds of buses that are traveling there. Or come yourself. The
cause is worth all the toil and sacrifice. It is worth participating in the
March in the snow and the cold. It is worth walking with thousands of other
marchers.
It is worth coming to the March year in and year out, even for 33 years. And
you may quickly agree that with the number of slain children in abortions, now
totaling in the tens of millions of infanticides, that such participation is
well worth our time.
You would be right, of course. 45 million abortions since 1973 is surely
something to protest. 1.2 million abortions per year in the United States is certainly
something to shock and outrage.
But I suggest to you that it would be worth it if only one child was
slaughtered by the abortion industry. Just one child would have made 33 years
of marches just as necessary.
The Orthodox Church does not weigh human life by statistics. It does not
consult actuarial tables to determine its morals. Neither does it survey the
time and place to decide between right and wrong. The Church protests against
the commodification of life that takes place in "quality of life" calculations.
The Church knows, from centuries of witnessing first-hand the rise and fall of
nations, that the destruction of human life cannot be confined to infanticide.
It will spread inexorably from babies to those who cannot convince the world
they are conscious enough.
The destruction has already spread. The taking of Terry Schiavo's life could
not have happened without Roe v. Wade. Euthanasia, doctor-assisted-suicides,
partial-birth abortions, human cloning, harvesting of stem cells from fetal
tissue - these are all real or near possibilities, brought about by the modern
penchant for calculating the dollars-and-cents worth of human life.
This horrible sort of calculation is what we protest when we march in Washington DC
this January. We protest against the abortion industry, yes, but we also
pronounce God's justice against the philosophies that made abortion possible in
the first place. We protest against the raging commercialism of the age, and
its utilitarianism that lulls the populace into stupor. We protest against the
eugenics doctrine - engineered by the likes of Margaret Sanger, the Rockefeller
estate, Planned Parenthood and NARAL - a doctrine that aims at a superior
genetic pool, and seeks to discard the weak and the poor. We protest against
the addiction to pleasure and entertainment that are the real opiates of the
masses. We protest against the willingness of the Western secular state to
build its edifice of consumption upon the sacrifice of inconvenient human
beings.
... human beings, as in the unborn. And it does not matter whether the unborn
child is only one, or 45 million. Every human life, every fetus, every
fertilized egg is a boy or girl, bearing the image of God, and is thus of
infinite worth.
I invite you to march in Washington
DC on Monday, January 23, 2006.
Be assured of my Archpastoral blessing and prayers for your provenance should
you make the journey.
I urge all of our Diocesan priests to intone special petitions for the
Pro-Life Cause on Sunday, January 22.
Granting you my Archpastoral blessing, and praying with you for the day when
Rachel no longer weeps, I remain
Yours in the Light and Hope of
Christ,
+
Metropolitan Nicholas
