Praised be Jesus Christ!

On this day, the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, His heart has triumphed against evil. Fulton Sheen once said that “Evil may have its hour, but God will have His day.” This is God's day. Evil has had its time but that time is at an end. As Catholics, we know that the war has been won for us by Christ but there are many battles we must fight along the way.

The Supreme Court has ruled that abortion is no longer legal on the federal level and has given the authority to regulate abortions to the people and their representatives. This means that we should rejoice over a hard battle won and continue to combat Evil. We must continue to pray and work in order to not only make abortion illegal everywhere but in the words of Archbishop Gomez, to make it “unthinkable.”

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen was a great advocate for the right to life. In Thoughts for Daily Living, Sheen discusses the rights of a human:

“A right is something that inheres in personality in order to insure its development and perfection. That is why man has a right to life; that is why a man has a right to adore God according to the dictates of his conscience.”

The right to life ensures that man can worship God. The Baltimore Catechism tells us that man is created to know, love, and serve God. Without the right to life, man cannot do this. In a beautiful meditation on motherhood, in his book Way to Happiness, Sheen gives the unborn child a dignity often forgotten by society:

“The soul of the child does not emanate from the mother's soul or body, but is freshly created by God Himself, Who infuses it into the body of the unborn child...The human mother does not bear a mere animal but a human being, made to the image and likeness of the God Who created it.”

Here Sheen makes it explicit that the child in the womb is a human person and not a clump of cells. Sheen personifies the baby and does not objectify it. Since there is another battle ahead, I would like to encourage everyone to pray this simple and easy-to-memorize prayer penned by Fulton Sheen after the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal in 1973:

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, I love you very much. I beg of you to spare the life of the unborn child I have spiritually adopted, who is in danger of abortion.”