01/25/2007 Bishop Robert Vasa

BEND — My travels this weekend were very limited. I had the happy fortune to be able to spend all day on Saturday, with the exception of some morning errands, at home. It was a very peaceful day with an intermingling of writing, little garage projects, prayer and rest. While I certainly would not describe my weekly schedule during the month of January as busy, it was nonetheless very good for me to have this day for re-creation.

In truth, the recreational part of the weekend started on Friday night when I attended the St. Francis of Assisi pizza and movie night. The feature film was Cars, the animated film about a self-centered, egotistical racecar. It was cute, as were the dozens of elementary-school children involved in this event, affectionately described as controlled chaos. I would, however, perhaps have to add the additional modifier “mostly” to the modifier “controlled.”

It was very good to see families coming together for wholesome and safe, upbeat and enjoyable, pleasant and relaxing, albeit a bit chaotic, fun. I commend the Family School Association of the parish for sponsoring and promoting this event and others like it. The importance of fostering a sense of community is certainly well known. It is important. Fostering that sense of community in the Lord is more important still.

Seeing the joyous product of what can happen when parishioners work together with harmony and peace reminds me of the many lay apostolates that are present and really flourishing in our diocese. These apostolates are not necessarily officially linked to the Catholic Church, but there are many Catholic parishioners involved and supportive of them.

The first which comes to mind is the St. Vincent de Paul Society. This is a Catholic organization that serves, in many ways, as the only Catholic social services program of Eastern and Central Oregon. The society, with outreach groups in various locations, including Bend, Redmond, La Pine, Prineville and The Dalles, operates food pantries and thrift stores.

The headline in Friday’s paper, “Social Services take funding hit,” included the St. Vincent de Paul Society in the list of affected charitable programs. The society is a community with many members spending lots and lots of volunteer hours in order to assure that needed services are available to the poor and needy.

These workers operate very much behind the scenes with little publicity and even less recognition. Perhaps the distressing news of a reduced federal grant will have the positive effect of drawing the interest, participation and contributions of many more members of the local community. I pray it is so. The local parishes already subsidize the work of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and I commend them for this.

Two other named charitable programs have a Catholic connection. The Bethlehem Inn was formerly operated out of and literally in the various churches of the area. The unified participation of the members of the local Christian communities was and is the driving force behind this shelter ministry.

Once again, there is a community of unsung and largely unknown workers and volunteers whose devotion and dedication make this ministry possible. The other charitable program with Catholic connections is Grandma’s House. Grandma’s House of Central Oregon is a faith-based, non-denominational, non-profit home, outreach ministry, providing safe, nurturing, and stable shelter to homeless and/or abused pregnant and parenting teen mothers between the ages of 12 and 19 years of age and their babies.

It is axiomatic for the purveyors of abortion to chastise the Catholic Church and other Christian and non-Christian churches for their perceived failure to engage more actively in the prenatal and postpartum care of women who face unwanted pregnancies, and ministries like Grandma’s House are a part of the answer to that chastisement.

The ministry relies upon free-will donations and a community of unsung and largely unknown workers and volunteers whose devotion and dedication make this ministry possible. While the portion of federal grant money they had hoped to receive is not mentioned in the newspaper article, and while the amount may not be objectively huge, I am sure that it will significantly increase the burden of concern on those who devote themselves to this service to life.

These are all pro-life endeavors. These charitable activities and ministries, and many more like them, speak to the authenticity and breadth of our pro-life convictions. Certainly, in this week of Jan. 22, there is an increased focus on the central and defining life issue of our generation.

Abortion is the defining life issue. Just as it is inconceivable for someone to be unconcerned about the poor, the needy, the homeless, the disenfranchised, the immigrant, so it is most disconcerting to see an American ambivalence and even active antipathy toward the pre-born.

If the same solution which our country deems appropriate for treating the undesired pre-born was directed toward the poor, the needy, the homeless, the disenfranchised or the immigrant then, I suspect, the extent of these “problems” could be diminished significantly.

No one, thanks be to God, proposes such heinous measures, unless of course, that poor, needy person has the misfortune of not yet being born. No one proposes the elimination of the homeless as the solution to homelessness unless that “homeless person” is the one forcibly evicted from the home God gave him or her in the womb.

No one proposes a “final solution” for dealing with the disenfranchised or immigrant unless that immigrant is one of the newest prenatal arrivals to our land. Our conviction about the intrinsic value and dignity of human life is evident in our compassion toward individuals in a variety of difficult social situations.

It is time in our land to extend that same compassion, that same protection of law and right reason, to those who have been deprived of these protections for the past 34 years. It is precisely the kind of thing a community would do. In a particularly striking way, it is the kind of thing that a community committed to the life and teaching of Jesus would do. It is the kind of thing that a community committed to the life and teachings of Jesus must do.