USCCB - Pro-Life Activities - Intercessions for Life

Intercessions for Life

September 1999

5 Sun - Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
For the courage to speak the truth,
in defense of the Gospel of life,
even when we are ridiculed and laughed at;
We pray to the Lord:

12 Sun - Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
For a growing awareness of life as a pure gift from God,
and for an end to hatred, anger, fear and death;
We pray to the Lord:

19 Sun - Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
For a growing respect for God and his law
and an acceptance of his will for us,
especially when we find it hard to understand or accept;
We pray to the Lord:

26 Sun - Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
For an end to selfishness and vainglory
that we might lay down our lives for the littlest and most defenseless;
We pray to the Lord:

"We must not be afraid of the future. We must not be afraid of man. It is no accident that we are here. Each and every human person has been created in the 'image and likeness' of the One who is the origin of all that is. We have within us the capacities for wisdom and virtue. With these gifts, and with the help of God's grace, we can build in the next century and the next millennium a civilization worthy of the human person, a true culture of freedom. We can and must do so! And in doing so, we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit."
—Pope John Paul II to the United Nations (October 5, 1995)

Bulletin Briefs
September 1999

The use of human embryos or fetuses as an object of experimentation constitutes a crime against their dignity as human beings who have a right to the same respect owed to a child once born, just as to every person.
---Pope John Paul II, The Gospel of Life

Respect for life must guide the choices we make as individuals and as a society: what we do and won't do, what we value and consume, whom we admire and whose example we follow, what we support and what we oppose. Respect for human life is the starting point for confronting a culture of violence.
---NCCB, "Confronting a Culture of Violence"

We cannot undo the injustice that has been done to 35 million tiny members of the human family who have been summarily killed since the Supreme Court, strip-mining the Constitution, discovered therein a fundamental right to an abortion. But we can stop the barbarity of partial-birth abortion. We can stop it. We must stop it, and we diminish our own humanity if we fail.
---U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde

This debate [about partial-birth abortion] searches out the soul of our culture. It is ultimately a question of how we are willing to define ourselves as a civilization. We must ask ourselves, are we so self-indulgent in our Nation that all notions of right and wrong can be summarily reduced to a matter of choice?... Let us reaffirm America as a culture of hope, a culture of life.
---U.S. Rep. Tim Hutchinson