The Archbishop has asked us to join him and his flock in prayer and penance for the nation over the sin of abortion. We respond. We will eat less today and pray a bit more. And think about deep things: the issues of life and death. Birth and immortality.

It is of course a great sadness that so gross an evil as abortion should become entrenched among us. And among the Catholic flock too. So great is the pressure of trend and fashion, spirits that move through the world subtly and powerfully.

It does not seem an appropriate concern of monks, or nuns, who live celibate. And it isn't. But we were born. We come from a family. We remain part of a family. And we love. We love our land and our people. It does not rest well on the heart that so many would be deceived by this world, act so foreign to our nature, contradict reality in such a gross way.

As if the Church invented love for life. Or even the ten commandments as imposed on us by some arbitrary God. Our faith is consonant with nature, rooted in it. Human nature. The law is from within. Not from without.

How long does it take a people to discover what works and what doesn't work? That is to say: What is natural to us and what not? Primitive peoples were thousands of years discovering what wears and what does not.

You cannot violate your nature and get by with it. So our stand is not judgmental. We do not preach the fires of Hell. We are much more here and now. Go contrary to nature and you contradict reality: the consequences are enormous. It will not work. You cannot get away with it. It does not wear. It does not sell. You've been had when they tell you it's normal, healthy. And above all, in your rights.

So I can tell you a story. I have not told it often. Once maybe in a retreat to Lutherans, some years ago in the Highlands of New Guinea. Among strangers in a far away place.

My father was a good man. But he slept with a girl in the southwest once while on some engineering project. And caught syphilis. My mother was outraged, indignant, angry, hurt. Later a child was conceived. The child was well on the way when she went to the parish priest and told him she was convinced the child within was rotten, sick, bad. She would abort it. She asked his permission. He told her in clear terms she certainly could do no such thing. This is South Boston Irish, 1915. When the cure for syphilis was probably bicarbonate of soda. She listened to the priest. The child was born: healthy and normal. I was the child.

What she had wanted to do with me haunted her the rest of her life.

She and my father are long dead. They are all gone. She never knew that I knew, for I discovered it by mere accident.

When I told her I was to be a priest, she took it hard. Though I did not know till years later that she wanted to get rid of me.

She lived her life with what she almost did, and did not, thanks to Father Toomey. She never knew I knew. And I have not talked about it. But I am witness to the devastating damage of those who abort, who would abort. You will be a lifetime with it. So unnatural is it. So alien. And we are overcome by darkness and murk when we lose sight of that.

We do not condemn. Point the finger. Send to Hell. We rather pray. It's grace and light involved, not human passion.

I think she came -- we never talked of it -- to peace and grace in the end.

As for me:  basically I would never trust a woman. They are very dangerous. In other words, the consequences for this evil are enormous for society. I knew even in the womb. The mother who survives knows too. Our response to that is prayer rooted in mercy. Prayer rooted in mercy.    Amen.