The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost

Events at the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts of the Apostles have roots deep in Salvation History. In the traditional Hebrew Pentecost, the Book of Ruth is read.

May 24 , 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

(Note: The graphic above depicts Ruth and Naomi preparing to depart Moab to venture down to Bethlehem.)

Shannon Bream, host of Fox News Sunday, is a lawyer by training having earned her Doctor of Law degree at a prestigious Florida law school. Prior to that, she graduated magna cum laude from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, a school founded in 1971 by evangelist Jerry Falwell. Not surprisingly, Ms. Bream has been well informed by her alma mater, and has written several books with an evangelical biblical perspective. Her titles to date include, The Women of the Bible Speak, The Mothers and Daughters of the Bible Speak, and The Love Stories of the Bible Speak.

One of the heroic women of the Biblical literature Ms. Bream wrote about in the first of those titles is Ruth, heroine of the Book of Ruth. It is a brief but remarkable story. In Jewish tradition, its author was the Hebrew judge Samuel. Although the book is descriptive of the period “when the judges ruled” (1:1), scholars have variously argued for its oral tradition in the time of the monarchy of King David (10th to 8th century BC), in the postexilic era (5th to 4th century BC), or somewhere in between the two.

The Book of Ruth tells of a family from the ancient town of Bethlehem in Judah that takes refuge in the country of Moab during a famine. While there, the sons of the Judean family marry Moabite women. When the father and the two sons die from unknown causes, the bereaved mother, Naomi, determines to return to her ancestral home in Bethlehem. She urges her daughters-in- law, Ruth and Orpah, to remain in Moab with their own people.

Orpah remains, but Ruth discerns that her duty of devotion to her deceased young husband also extends to his bereaved mother, Naomi, who is now widowed and alone. So Ruth insists on accompanying Naomi to Bethlehem. The story provides a moving quote of Ruth that over the centuries has found its way into the popular music of Christian liturgy:

“Wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you dwell, I shall dwell there also. Your people will be my people, and your God shall be my God too. Wherever you die, I shall die, and there shall I be buried beside you.”

— Ruth 1:16-17

In Bethlehem, Ruth’s beauty, devotion and kindness soon attract the attention of Naomi’s near kinsman Boaz, (2:l-4:12). Despite the fact that Ruth is a foreigner, Boaz, a Jew, marries her, and by an act of Divine Providence she becomes the great grandmother of King David, of whose lineage Jesus was born. This is noted in the genealogy at the beginning of Saint Matthew’s Gospel. It’s an odd inclusion in the genealogy:

“... and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Raihab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the King.”

— Matthew 1:4-6

It was highly unusual for any genealogy to add the name of the maternal line in Sacred Scripture, but both Ruth and the small and inconspicuous Book of Ruth have an outsized influence and footprint on the faith of Israel and Pentecost. It is evidence of the Spirit of God guiding Salvation History across millennia. I must remember that when I am bowed low by whatever cross I happen to carry in this time. The Great Tapestry of God has threads I can only see from the back in another life.

Pentecost and a Bigger Picture

As a story, the Book of Ruth provides an account of the series of events that led up to the inclusion of a Moabite in the ancestry of King David, and one thousand years later, of Joseph, spouse of Mary, and, by extension and adoption, Jesus. The story’s emphasis on the fact that Ruth is a foreigner, her acceptance by the people of Bethlehem despite this fact, her place in the genealogy of King David, and the acceptance of the book as part of the Hebrew canon all suggest a deeper and more complex purpose.

So it comes as no surprise that the Book of Ruth is read in the Hebrew observance of “Shavuot,” known in English as the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. It is one of three pilgrimage festivals requiring a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for its observance. In the Hebrew calendar, Shavuot falls on the Sixth day of Sivan, the day after the conclusion of seven weeks — the fiftieth day after Passover. Hence the name, “Pentecost,” from Greek, “pentekoste” meaning fiftieth day.

In later Old Testament times, the Festival of the Harvest also became associated with the giving of the law to Moses upon Mount Sinai which, by tradition, also took place on the Sixth Day of Sivan. Because of the association with the giving of the Torah, a tradition evolved among Jews to honor Shavuot with an all-night vigil called the “Tikkun for Shavuot Eve.” It included readings from the first and last verses of each weekly Torah reading, a selection of Psalms, paragraphs from the six Orders of the Krishnah, a list of the 613 precepts of Moses, and the Book of Ruth.

It was for the observance of the Hebrew Pentecost that Mary, Mother of the Lord, and the Apostles were present in Jerusalem for the events that would become the Christian Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-47) the fiftieth day after the Resurrection of Jesus. It was the descent of the Holy Spirit among them. It was the birth of the Church.

When Beyond These Stone Walls began in the summer of 2009, I had no idea that I would still be writing posts from prison for it in 2023. I wrote about many things, but a priority for me was to write posts about Sacred Scripture with a focus on some of the Sunday Gospel readings which many readers seemed to like.

But I have run into an unforeseen problem. I have tried to research and write special posts at major feasts such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost but in 2023 I am faced with writing about the same Scriptures again and again. I do not have the luxury of looking out at a congregation gathered for Mass to adjust the length of my homily by the number of people I see yawning or dropping off.

Writing at Pentecost has been one of my biggest challenges. For one thing, Pentecost always comes at or near the anniversary of my priesthood ordination which I also feel obliged to mention in a post. It would be an insult to Catholics if I ignore my own ordination. In 2022, Pentecost fell on June 5th which was also my 40th anniversary of priesthood. So for the first time I combined the two subjects into one post. The next few paragraphs are an excerpt from “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost”:

It is interesting that the word for both wind and breath in Hebrew is ‘ruah,’ and the term in Hebrew for the Holy Spirit is ‘ruah ha-Qodesh.’ It simultaneously means the Spirit of God, the Wind of God, and the Breath of God. The same term is used in the story of Creation (Genesis 1:1-2) :

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God, ‘ruah ha-Qodesh,’ was moving over the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2)

And the term was used again in Genesis 2:7 as God breathed the Spirit into the nostrils of Adam, and again in the Resurrection appearance of Jesus to the Apostles, “He breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” (John 20:22)

When I look back on forty years of priesthood, most of them in exile, imprisoned souls were reached through no merit of my own. In spite of myself, the Wind of God took me up in its vortex, and I am simply blown away by it.

The Great Gifts of the Spirit

“Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.”

— Peter at the Institution of the Eucharist, Luke 22:33

In Genesis 11:1-9 is related the story of a great tower erected in the land of Shinar in Babylon. The great Tower of Babel was left unfinished because Yahweh confounded the speech of the builders so they could not comprehend each other. The city was thenceforth called “Babel” which is the etymology of our word, “babble,” a term for incomprehensible speech. The story was an imaginative attempt to account for the origin of the diversity of languages.

The tower is today recognized as a “ziggurat,” a towering pyramid of successively recessed levels of stone. For the Babylonians, its purpose was ceremonial as a “cosmic mountain,” symbolic of the Earth itself. Its height was seen as a way to God as described in Genesis 11:4, a tower that “could reach to the heavens.”

As in many such stories, there is both a literal history behind it and an interpretation of it in the mind of the Ancient Near East. The tower became in time the story of God’s scattering of the human race into diverse languages. The story of Pentecost in Acts 2:5-12 has “men from every nation under heaven” in a multitude that came together and were bewildered as each heard the witness of the Apostles in their own languages.

They were “Parthians and Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and Libya, and Cyrene, and parts of Rome, Jews and Greeks alike, Cretans and Arabs.” They were the known world of that time, all the nations of Northern Africa and the Middle East surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, literally the Sea of Middle Earth. Each heard of the mighty works of God in their own languages (Acts 2:5-12). For some, it was an answer to the divisions of our Babel-ing.

But others only mocked, accusing the Apostles of drunkenness: “they are filled with new wine.” Then came the great discourse of Peter (Acts 2:14-36) which began with a spirited defense of the Apostles:

“Men of Judea, and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words. These men are not drunk as you suppose for it is only the third hour of the day.” And then Peter spoke from the Prophet Joel, and in the end, a great multitude came to believe and were received into the Church.

This was Peter filled with the Spirit and fortitude, the same Peter who, just 54 days earlier at the Last Supper vowed to the Lord that he would go with him to prison and to death. It was the same Peter who just a day later fell to the lower depths of Golgotha to deny three times that he even knew Him.

In my life as a priest, the wind of Pentecost has been more like a Category Five storm than the gentle breeze of the Spirit I once envisioned priesthood to be. After graduation with a double major in psychology and philosophy from St Anselm College in New Hampshire in 1978, I enrolled in a four year post-graduate degree program in theological studies at St. Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1978 to 1982. Summers and between semesters were spent in a three-year counseling internship for the Baltimore County Police Crisis Intervention Unit. It was an education in human suffering.

One of my seminary professors was a young priest named Fr Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, a popular Catholic author who taught courses in Scripture and spirituality. Forty-one years later, just as I started this post, I discovered Father Rolheiser again in the pages of Give Us This Day, a monthly prayer and liturgical guide published by Liturgical Press in Collegeville, Minnesota. He had a brief reflection on Pentecost that I have been trying to decipher. Here is a segment:

“The Christian paschal cycle has five distinct moments: Good Friday, Easter Sunday, the Forty Days, the Ascension, and Pentecost. These were five moments in Jesus’ life as he moved through his death, his resurrection, his forty days of post-resurrection appearances, his ascension, and his sending of the Holy Spirit. ... The five interpenetrating moments in Jesus’ life that stretch from Good Friday to Pentecost invite us to always: Name your deaths; Claim your births; Mourn what you lost; Don’t cling to what you had but let it ascend. If we do this, Pentecost will happen in our lives. We will receive a new spirit for the life that we are, in fact, living.”

— Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI, “Pentecost Will Happen”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this Pentecost post with its challenges to let the Spirit of Truth and Grace dwell within us. You may also like these related posts:

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and The Sins of the Times

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Please note that Pentecost ends the Easter Season. We will be removing our Holy Week Retreat as a menu option, but we will include it from henceforth as a Library Category of posts. It was well received among readers, and I thank you.

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Personal Intention from Fr Gordon MacRae: May 24, 2023 marks one year since the tragic losses of life in Uvalde, Texas. Please pray for the people of this deeply wounded community and for the healing of this community's broken hearts.

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing

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Our Adoration Chapel founded by Saint Maximilian Kolbe will remain at Beyond These Stone Walls. Jesus came to us through Mary, and now we may reciprocate. Thank you for spending time in Eucharistic Adoration. Please also offer a prayer for me because I am the only one among us unable to see the Chapel.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life

Racial justice and a dubious idea of critical race theory are now center stage in our culture, but they give no voice to the most urgent Civil Rights issue of all.

For the entire second term in the presidency of Barack Obama, Ohio Republican congressman John Boehner was Speaker of the House of Representatives. He left that office in 2015. A devout Catholic, he had been honored by the University of Notre Dame with the Laetare Medal, a distinction awarded to Catholics in public life who witness to their faith in extraordinary ways. During Speaker Boehner’s first address to the House of Representatives in 2011, he said that “America is more than a country. It’s an idea.” Like any great idea, it did not begin in its current form. The idea of America evolved with fits and starts in response to both prophets and protests — and wars, and great losses, and immense sacrifices. From my perspective, in the decade from 1963 to 1973 the very idea of America gave birth to a Civil Rights movement that was hard fought and continues to be. Milestones were reached, but the Civil Rights movement never ended. It now just takes another form.

Civil Rights as an idea is not yet a done deal. Just as the idea formed and took shape for some in America, it failed an entire class of others. Just as the idea of Civil Rights embraced our fellow Americans living lives marked by racial divisions and distinctions, it failed millions of others not yet living outside the womb.

In the decade of the 1970s, it sometimes felt like I would be in school forever. After four years studying psychology and philosophy at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school just outside Manchester, NH, I commenced another four years at Saint Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland from where I was awarded a Master of Divinity and a Pontifical degree in Sacred Theology. Saint Mary’s is the oldest Catholic seminary in the United States and, at that time at least, was the most academically demanding.

Like many seminarians then, I was chronically poor. During the rationing and long gas lines of the late 1970s, I paid $900 for a clunker of a 1969 Chevy Malibu. It had a V-8 engine that could pass everything but gas stations, and when I bought it, it burned almost as much oil as gasoline. A friend and I spent all our spare time in the summer of 1978 rebuilding its engine before I drove it off to Baltimore to begin the great adventure of faith seeking understanding. I was proud of the fact that we got the Malibu’s gas mileage up to a point where I could sit in the long gas lines with a clear conscience, though I don’t think General Motors would have still recognized its engine. I loved that car, not the least for where it took me.

Roaring around Baltimore from 1978 to 1982, I quickly learned that the great city was second only to my native Boston for the lure and lore of its history. Outside the seminary, there was a whole other field of education within 100 miles of Baltimore in any direction. So Saturdays in the seminary were devoted to field trips to the birth and growth of America; to the places where the idea first took shape. That’s when visiting history became my hobby, and an important part of my education. Much more than my loss of freedom, now, I mourn the passing of the world beyond these stone walls.

Upon the Field of Battle

One place stands out strikingly against the background of monuments and memories I visited and studied. I had some friends among the seminarians at Mount Saint Mary Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, a two+ hour drive from Baltimore. On several Saturdays, my speedy Malibu drove north to pick up my friends and head for Gettysburg, just a few miles from Emmitsburg straddling the Maryland and Pennsylvania state line.

It’s hard to describe what I felt the first time I stood surveying the very heart of America’s most terrible war. The Battle of Gettysburg was fought there over the first four days of July in 1863. President Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address was delivered on that field on November 19, 1863, just three months after the horrific four-day battle that took the lives of over 80,000 Americans.

For some reason, standing on that field of battle for the first time in 1979, I thought of John F. Kennedy and his signature cause, the Civil Rights movement which was in turn taken up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson after Kennedy’s untimely death in 1963. It came as a shock to me to realize that the defining battle of the American Civil War — that I once thought to be ancient history — was fought and then immortalized in Lincoln’s great speech just l00 years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was exactly 100 years, barely three generations in the lives of men. The Battle of Gettysburg, and all that led up to it, took place in the lifetime of my grandfather’s grandfather.

Suddenly, with that revelation, I felt linked to all that came before. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1974 historical novel, The Killer Angels relived this most decisive battle of the American Civil War, and my first visit came just after this great work of historical storytelling.

It felt strange standing for the first time upon Cemetery Hill where the Civil War pivoted toward victory for the North. But there was really no victory. It was America against itself, and the powerful imprint of death and sacrifice was still upon that battlefield as I stood there 116 years later. It was both eerie and inspiring. My friends went off to tour the museum and stare at row upon row of cannonballs and muskets, but I couldn’t leave that field. I realized standing there for the first time just what an idea can cost, and what hardship and sacrifice it can demand from those who serve it.

The Right to Life and the Cost of Liberty

By the time the Civil War was over, it demanded of America more lives of its citizens than World War I and World War II combined. Some 500,000 lost their lives fighting this nation’s war against itself. I didn’t understand then just how this happened, but standing on that Gettysburg field, I resolved to one day understand. Men and women can sacrifice their lives for an idea, or an ideal, or a principle that is far greater than themselves. They can sacrifice freedom, even, to stand firm on a ground made solid by conscience.

Many historians and legal scholars draw a direct line between the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and a single case decided before the U.S. Supreme Court four years earlier in 1857. As a causal connection, the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford enraged conscience-driven abolitionists and encouraged slave owners. It broadened the political and ideological abyss between the North and the South, and it led directly to a war of nothing less than the demands of conscience versus the realities of economic necessity and convenience.

Dred Scott was a fugitive slave. In 1848 at the age of 62, having spent decades in secret learning to read and write, he brought suit to claim his freedom on the ground that he resided in a free territory established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. This is a piece of American history that must not be overlooked or forgotten, though many would prefer not to know. Dred Scott was purchased and lived his life as a slave, but was then taken by his “master”, an Army surgeon, to a free territory rendered free by the Missouri Compromise.

In Dred Scott v. Sanford, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney wrote for the majority that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and violated the Fifth Amendment because it deprived Southerners of a right to bring their private property — i.e., slaves — wherever they wanted. The decision further ruled that Congress did not have the authority to establish free territory, and in its most alarming language, Justice Taney’s decision established that black men are not citizens of the United States and had “no rights any white man is bound to respect.”

Reflecting upon this now, five generations later, is made all the more painful by the recognition that Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney was a Catholic, though one who surely put the realities of national economics above the tenets of faith or conscience. As I wrote in “The True Story of Thanksgiving,” the Catholic Church had three centuries earlier established slavery as a moral evil, and declared it unacceptable in any Catholic country. It would take another 250 years from the founding of America for this nation to put economic interest aside and catch up with the conscience of the Catholic Church.

Justice Taney’s decision caused some in his day to conclude that there is a higher moral law than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution at any given time in history. There is a higher moral law, and it led the nation on a direct path from Dred Scott to Civil War. The war came as a result of the conscience of individuals gradually forming a consensus about slavery, racial justice and the rights of man.

Rev. Martin Luther King and Father John Crowley

One hundred years after that war was fought, its ripples continued throughout this nation. In 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated for his unwavering and prophetic public witness in a story that we all know only too well. My friend, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus (who contributed to our “About” page) wrote of the radical grace exemplified by Martin Luther King in American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. He wrote of Dr. King’s notion of “The Beloved Community” and described his movement as a new order . . .

“. . . sought by all who know love’s grief in refusing to settle for a community of less than truth and justice uncompromised.”

Think for a moment, please, about that statement. There are not many of us who escape love’s grief — unless we become so shallow as to so steel ourselves against grief that we can ignore it. What a tragedy! Those of us who know love’s grief and refuse to settle for a community — a nation, a Church — of less than truth and justice uncompromised are in for some prophetic suffering.

Three years before Martin Luther King was assassinated, Father John Crowley, a heroic Catholic priest, was nearly driven from Selma, Alabama when he took out a full-page ad in the Selma Times-Journal on February 7, 1965.

His ad contained a brilliant essay entitled “The Path to Peace in Selma.” It urged the white community to speak out against racial segregation and discrimination not for the good of the black man and woman, but for the good of ALL men and women. Like the famous Lutheran Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler on April 9, 1945, Father John Crowley called upon fellow priests and other Catholics to put aside their fears of loss and stand by the truth uncompromised. I share a date of birth with the date of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death, and I share my June 5th date of priesthood ordination with Father John Crowley. These very special men compel me to stand always by the truth uncompromised, and not to fear its cost.

Stand against the Culture of Death

Martin Luther King lost his life just five years before another divisive Supreme Court decision with grave implications for Civil Rights. There are some, and they are many, who see in the 1857 decision in Dred Scott the roots of the 1973’s Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Anthony Kennedy have both cited this connection. In 1973, after the Supreme Court handed down its divided decision in Roe v. Wade, the State of Texas joined other states in filing a petition for a rehearing before the full Court. The Texas dissent declared that the decision in Roe that an unborn child was not a human being with rights to be protected was not at all unlike the decision in Dred Scott that virtually no just person in this nation would ever stand by today.

And just as Dred Scott inspired dissidents of conscience to hear the Commandments of a Higher Authority, Roe v. Wade has inspired similar heroism, most of it barely noticed in the mainstream media, or, worse, taunted. Have you noticed that much of the loudest ridicule of the Catholic Church in America comes on the heels of legislation that chips away at the right to life and human dignity? Many a media barrage against the Catholic Church has been for the purpose of silencing its pro-life voice in the public square.

Life Site News has carried the stories of two Canadian women whose sacrifices on behalf of civil rights for the unborn had landed them in prison. Linda Gibbons, a grandmother and prisoner of conscience, spent seven years in an Ontario prison because she refused to comply with a court order demanding that she cease and desist from standing on the sidewalk near an Ontario clinic to present alternatives to abortion. In eerie echoes of the Dred Scott decision, the clinic staff and the Ontario court charged her with interfering with fair commerce by suggesting to clients another way. Linda Gibbons first went to prison at the same time I did, in September 1994.

Mary Wagner took leave from a French convent to “witness to life” as Life Site News has called her sacrifice. In Holy Week, 2010, Mary was arrested by Vancouver police and remained in jail for months for refusing to obey court orders to cease talking to abortion clinic clients about Project Rachel.

And you may have heard of the late Norma McCorvey. She’s better known as “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Norma became a Catholic in 1998 and also became a dedicated pro-life activist. She was author of the 1998 book, Won by Love. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition by Norma McCorvey to reverse Roe v. Wade. In May 2009, she was among the Catholic pro-life witnesses arrested at the University of Notre Dame during President Obama’s Commencement address.

We can deduce where Martin Luther King would stand on the pressing civil rights issues of this day. There is some annual controversy that his niece, Dr. Alveda King, endeavors to clear up. She staunchly defends Rev. King against claims that he would be a pro-choice or pro-abortion supporter today. She insists that his civil rights agenda would today include a defense of life. It’s no irony that the week that begins in honor of his martyrdom for civil rights ends with the National March for Life in Washington, DC.

Beginning in the fall of 2004, 40 Days for Life has held prayer vigils at 238 locations in the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia. The US Catholic Bishops would do well to heed the courageous voices of those who have sacrificed much for the pro-life cause while the bishops debate the sanctity of the Eucharist and the demeanor necessary to receive the Body of Christ. The great Lutheran pastor, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, went to prison for writing to his fellow Lutherans that they cannot both profess their belief in Christ and support the Third Reich and its culture of death.

Conceived in Liberty

On the Saturday after my first visit to Gettysburg in 1979, I drove an hour south from Baltimore to Washington, DC. I went first to the Lincoln Memorial where the famous Gettysburg Address is etched into the stone behind the immense man’s monumental presence. The great speech immortalized the struggle for civil rights as an ongoing struggle that must never be set aside if the idea of America is to survive.

As I read it, I thought of that awful battlefield where I stood 116 years later, and also of the civil rights battlefields of today where millions are denied the right to life, and the millions more who sacrifice to witness for them. Lincoln’s memorable words apply no less to them.

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Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger-sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from those honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: As readers know, we have restored a few older posts in the last three weeks while I have been unable to write. This post was first written in 2011. It has been substantially updated and revised so it is actually a new post. Among the several pro-life posts I have written, many readers thought this one to stand out.

The Supreme Court has announced that it will review limits on abortion which in turn could lead to a review of Roe v Wade. President Biden just announced his new commission to study packing the Court. There is too much at stake to stay on the sidelines. Please share this post.

You might also be interested in this related post:

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life