The pro-life movement is a movement of prayer, and one of the leading forces behind that movement for decades has been Priests for Life, and its interdenominational outreach, Gospel of Life Ministries.

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Teaching believers the rationale and shape of pro-life prayer, this ministry provides ongoing prayer campaigns timed with religious and secular calendars (PrayerCampaign.org), specific pro-life prayers for all occasions (ProLifePrayers.org), and opportunities for believers to share prayer intentions with one another (PrayerIntentions.org).

The foundation of all that can be accomplished in the pro-life movement is prayer. “Without me,” Christ said, “you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5). Jesus does not merely “help” us, as if we were working on our own, and He came along to ease the burden. Rather, we cannot even begin a good work without His saving action within us. We need to pray more and with greater fervor.

Yet, believers must ensure that prayer never becomes an excuse, a refuge from our responsibility to take action to stop abortion. The forms of action are many and varied. But we are called to action.

Why?

For the very same reason, we are called to pray! Does God really need us to pray? Does He need to be reminded of His duties, or told to do His job? Of course not. Yet He calls us to pray, because He wants us to be involved in what He is doing.

If, therefore, He calls us to pray, even when He could act without our prayers, it is reasonable that He calls us to action, even when He could act without our works. God calls us not because He needs us but because He chooses to use us.

Prayer is not just asking God to do something. That’s part of it, but it’s more. Prayer is union with God. Prayer means we open ourselves so wide to God that He comes in and does something through us! Prayer and action are not two separate options, but rather two aspects of the same reality: union with God.

When we come to prayer, we come to the living God, a consuming fire, the source of all activity. When we come away from prayer, we should not feel rested but restless. We should not feel that we’ve done our duty, but that we’ve been given our duty.

When you ask God to stop evils like abortion, His response may well be to reach down from heaven, lift you up by the back of the neck, and throw you into the battle! God is not going to rip open the sky, come down, and tell our nation to stop abortion. Instead, He is going to put conviction in your heart and words on your lips and command you to speak and act!

Christian prayer is always rooted in the theme, “Thy will be done!”

And we know that a firm and eternal aspect of God’s will, which in fact represents the purpose of salvation history, is that He will destroy death. And we can hasten the process and spread the victory of life.

“The Lord will destroy death forever!” This marvelous declaration from Isaiah 25:8 should sustain us daily in our pro-life efforts. When we pray to end abortion, we are not just asking God to do us some favor or to grant a request. It’s much more momentous than that. When we ask Him to end abortion, we are pleading for the fulfillment of His great plan of conquering death.

It was about this that God first spoke when He promised in Genesis 3:15 (the “first gospel”) that the head of the serpent would be crushed. It was for this that Jesus Himself died and rose again; it is for this that every Church ministry exists. Proclaiming the Gospel means proclaiming life!

As Paul explains in 1 Cor. 15, as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive, but each in his own order. Christ is the first to rise from the dead; then all things are to be made subject to Him, and in Him, all will rise at the end of time. “Then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory!” (1 Cor. 15:54).

When Scripture talks about the new and eternal Jerusalem, urging us to look forward to that day when we will all be gathered around the throne, it declares, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying out nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

That is why we pray to end abortion, because we are caught up in a mighty dynamic of history, over which God presides. Our prayers are a great Amen to a process in which we are all involved and which culminates in the eternal victory of life!

Finally, prayer and worship bring us necessarily to the core of being prolife.

One of the most reliable indicators of a person’s pro-life convictions is the regularity of that person’s Sunday worship. And the reason is not hard to understand: the attitude behind abortion is the opposite of the attitude behind worship. The former says, “I am in charge,” and the latter says, “God is in charge.” The former corresponds to the thinking of the evil one as exposed by Isaiah’s rebuke to the arrogant King of Babylon for thinking he could make himself like God (Is. 14:13-14). The latter corresponds to the thinking of the Holy One as revealed by St. Paul writing to the Philippians, showing how, although Jesus was God, he humbled Himself and became obedient (Phil. 2:5-8).

Prayer is our life; as we grow in union with God, may our pro-life convictions and actions become ever stronger, to the glory of God in Jesus Christ!

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Pro-life Leader Frank Pavone leads Priests for Life (www.ProLifeCentral.org), a multifaceted family of ministries working to end abortion and heal the wounds it causes. Photo Credit: Chichi Onyekanne on Unsplash.