Cardinal O’Connor Conference Speaker: Mother Agnes
These are my notes from Mother Agnes’ speech at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference. Parts are paraphrased or directly quoted from her words.
Annie found herself pregnant and ended up staying the Sisters of Life. She made a deal with God, that she’d give Him a year of her life, but that she would want it back. She adjusted to the life in the convent, but then ran away. But afterwards, she returned, saying that “Here are people who love me.” When her delivery date came, she went to the hospital and gave birth. She declined to hold the child, generous to a fault, so that the adoptive mother would have that privilege.
Eight months later, she returned to the convent for the first year anniversary celebration. She told her story, recounting the tapestry of grace that she saw in her life. She said, “I have my life back, and it’s even better.” I tell you this story for it reveals much about God’s ways, and about the joys that one can find when one is faithful to grace.
Here in Washington, a common purpose draws us together. We have come to proclaim that every human life is sacred. We have come to witness to the Supreme Court, the Congress and the President that we will never be satisfied with the codification of abortion in our nation’s laws. Your presence today here suggests that you contest the Great Lie of the West: that there is no such thing as truth. We believe that there is truth, and that truth can be known, and that the Truth is a person, Jesus the Christ. This belief is simultaneously a summons; to fulfill the demands of this summons will require that we pioneer the last frontier: the interior life of the soul.
Test your heart. Is it filled with desires to live a good and noble life, filled with meaning and purpose. Is there a yearning within you to live the great love you sense you have the capacity for? Test your heart and notice that you desire to be holy in an unholy world. This summons to the truth about life is in essence an invitation to an encounter wit h the Living God, a graced summons you have received to a little more than a march.
Why, you ask, is an encounter with God pivotal with building a culture of life? Cardinal O’Connor answered this question fifteen years ago, after having been at a conclave of cardinals gathered together at John Paul II’s behest to determine the threat from abortion and euthanasia. It became clear, he said, however valid and indispensable the various activities of the pro-life movement are, we are dealing with something evil, something perverse. It could never be said that it is natural for a woman to destroy a child. We have set about killing one another to an extent infinitely beyond all wars ever fought through history. Forty million babies are put to death around the world every here.
We have fought this battle in legislatures; as if we were dealing with a merely human adversary. We thought, at first, that all we had to do was bring about awareness that unborn babies are human babies; that we merely needed to write new laws. We are dealing with something beyond the natural, and only the supernatural can bring us eventual salvation. Prayer must be the base, he continued, of all we do to bring about a change.
The world today is besieged by the demon of contempt for human life. Witness the creeping growth of euthanasia, of impurity. If everything is contemptible, then nothing deserves respect. Marriage does not deserve respect, a woman’s body does not deserve respect, a man’s body does not deserve respect. Our Lord tells us, as he told the apostles upon their return from their first mission, that this kind of demon can only be cast out via prayer and fasting.
God’s grace is the gentlest power in the universe. Grace is compelling without coercing, because in the end I must decide, I must choose. Temptation is the opposite of grace. The more a soul responds to grace, the greater becomes its thirst for God. In the end, we are at best unprofitable servants. Any good we do we do because of grace.