Later this month Ann and I are going to spend about a week in Lourdes, France, with about twenty other pilgrims. It isn’t a vacation but a chance to work with the sick people who go to Lourdes seeking a cure in the waters at the Grotto, or seeking a deeper faith and acceptance of their malady.
Our Pilgrimage to Lourdes
Ann and I want to help the people at the trains, on their way to the baths and to join in the many prayers and processions that take place there daily. According to Fr. Wayne Watts of Chicago Catholic Charities, who will be our chaplain and our guide , there will be plenty for all of us to do.
What Ann and I hope to gain from this pilgrimage is a deeper understanding of the value of suffering. We also want to direct our activities toward another group of people who need help, after concentrating almost exclusively on the unborn and their mothers for thirty-one years.
While we’re away please keep us in your prayers. We will pray for all our benefactors and Action News readers at the Grotto. When we get back, Ann and I will each do an Action News to give both of our perspectives.
Mother Deaf to Counselor’s Appeal
All manner of strange things happen in front of the abortion mills where we pray and sidewalk counsel. One of the strangest was a sermon one of our counselors got recently from a mother who was taking her teenage daughter for an abortion.
Our counselor was trying to tell the young girl that abortion is a dangerous operation and one she will someday regret, when the mother started shouting “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Our counselor said she wasn’t judging anyone, but just giving helpful and accurate advice. They went in.
Later the mother came out to continue sermonizing, telling our counselor once again not to judge her. Our counselor then showed the mother a picture of an aborted baby and said, ” I’m not judging anyone. I’m just saying that you have no right to put your teenage daughter through this. She will have to live with this abortion for the rest of her life, and you are the one making her do it, so you will have to live with this, too. Those are just facts.”
The woman fell silent. But she did not go back in to save her daughter from a lifetime of regret.
But shortly before that episode, Rick, another faithful sidewalk counselor, actually got help in talking a woman out of abortion from a woman who had an abortion at that mill two years earlier. She told the woman being counseled that this same Rick had tried to talk her out of abortion, but she wouldn’t listen, and that her life fell apart following the abortion.
She pleaded with the new girl not to go in, and the girl said, “It has to be a miracle that you came by just when you did. You have convinced me that I shouldn’t do this.” So, miracles still happen.
Loyola To Honor Pro-Abort Madigan
If you have been listening to Relevant Radio you can’t have missed the message that pro-abortion Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is receiving the prestigious St. Robert Bellarmine Award from the Loyola School of Law on October 30. We’ve mentioned this travesty on Action News, but Relevant Radio’s Drew Mariani has been running an ongoing discussion, trying to find a way to prevent this from happening.
Even the Cardinal’s appeal to the University has been rejected. We’ve rarely been able to stop a Catholic high school, college or university from going through with one of these un-Catholic ideas, and it’s almost no use trying to reason with them. Possibly if someone could get their really big donors to stop the money flow, they’d pay attention. But appeals to logic and reason and religion rarely work.
However, none of them like being embarrassed at the event, so that’s about the only option left to those who don’t think honoring pro-abort Catholics is a good idea. Stay tuned.
