From the Heart of the Shepherd
Updated: 4 days ago
From the bulletin for The Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (2026 October 04)
Oct 4, 2026 - 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Arriving at the intersection of University Avenue and Vandalia is always unnerving. Looming large on the north end is, of course, the local abortion mega-center, whose presence is amplified all the more by Planned Parenthood’s giant billboard overlooking the crossing. While we go about our ordinary days, perhaps on a bright, sunny day, within those walls ordinary fellow citizens are making a violent end to innocent lives, and tragically at their mothers’ at least half-hearted request.
It should be unnerving. All the more so since this is just an “ordinary” part of life in 21st Century America. What is one to do? He says a Hail Mary, makes the sign of the Cross, and goes about his day. The uneasy feeling recedes as the uncomfortable reality recedes into the distance.
But really, what is one to do? Leo Tolstoy once wrote an essay entitled What Then Shall We Do? about the frightful poverty which drenched the streets of the Moscow of his day. In it he recounts his own struggles to find an answer: his qualms about his own use of three or four undershirts a day (which he could do thanks to his social position) while the masses went about in rags; his forays into the slums to hand out cash and the ill effect he perceived of those errands; etc. Something needed to be done, but what? The same can be said about abortion. A political solution seems practically impossible, given how staunchly the horror is supported by so many Americans and their rulers. Civil Rights-era-eque nonviolent resistance or civil disobedience has not exactly been tried, but would require an organization and resolve that seem lacking within the pro-life ranks, whose members (unlike many of their opponents) are busy raising families of their own. And more proportionate means of opposing the death-machine at the heart of modern society would be counterproductive. What, then, are we to do?
The year before our parish church was built, concerned Christians were asking the same question about the senseless war by which Europe was then consuming itself and the scourge of Communism which was then festering in Russia (promising to resolve the poverty which Tolstoy and his contemporaries never could!). Marvelously, Heaven itself uttered the solution, on the lips of the Mother of God herself: to pray the Rosary daily for peace and to consecrate Russia to her immaculate Heart. Then the war would end, a second world war would be avoided, the world would be spared Russia’s errors, and the Holy Father would have much less to suffer.
To any worldly person or politico, even one of faith, the solution must have seemed utterly unsuited to the problem. You are saying we should do… what? Our Mother’s way was too simple; to trust in her word was thought hopelessly naive. And so men of good will chose to take another tact, their own, and to combat the ills of their time with other, more suitable means. Just over a century later, we can look back now as ask: how did that work out for us?
Awash in “Russia’s errors” (let’s remember that abortion and Communism coincide in their denial of both God and human dignity), perhaps it’s time we listen to the one who listened to God best of all. We are two weeks deep into 40 Days for Life, the biannual campaign to end abortion (or at least remind ourselves that it is occurring in our midst). Could we all say the Rosary, daily, for peace? To pray it while witnessing against abortion outside of the local Ground Zero has a special efficacy and witness value. But the main thing is to pray it. In doing so, even half-distractedly, we give our Mother “the sign,” the assent to enter in and be active as She wants to be, and as only She can be, to save us from the mess our sins have gotten us into. To pray the Rosary daily, beholding as best we can through Mary’s eyes the mysteries of Jesus’ divine life, a power flows into this world through us. The same power which swallowed Pharaoh and all his forces in the sea, by which Gideon and his few men conquered a vast army by banging pots and pans, by which Esther saved her nation from certain annihilation, and by which Satan was crushed by the fulfillment of his own malicious plans. It’s the power of the Cross of Jesus, of the obedience of Jesus… that is what we can and should (and must) do.
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