“It advocates opening the way for assisted suicide theoretically, in carefully regulated cases. Yet, experience in other jurisdictions shows that in practice this culture of assisted suicide extends rapidly to include those with mental illnesses and even young children,” the bishop warned.
Christ’s words, “Whatever you did to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did to me,” means that “In today’s proliferating attacks on the lives of those most vulnerable, we are witnessing nothing less than a rejection of God-made-man.”
Davies drew on St. John Paul II’s teaching that every rejection of human life is “really a rejection of Christ” himself. As a counterexample to this rejection, he praised the motherhood of the Virgin Mary as “the incomparable model of how life should be welcomed and cared for.”
In the Book of Revelation, “Death shall be no more,” is “the promise that every fearful manifestation of evil which threatens to overwhelm humanity and thwart God’s purpose will finally be dispelled by the total victory of life.”
He closed his homily with an invocation of the Virgin Mary as the “Mother of the Living,” entrusting to her “the cause of life.”
The National Pro-Life Pilgrimage to Walsingham also offered chances for confession and Eucharistic Adoration, as well as organized recitations of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, and other prayers, the pilgrimage website said.
Walsingham was a major pilgrimage site in English Christianity, dating back to the 11th century. The original shrine and a nearby Augustinian priory were destroyed in the 16th century during the English Reformation. Covert Catholic pilgrimages to the site continued until they were legalized once again in the 19th century.
The pro-life pilgrimage concluded with an afternoon walk to the ruins of the priory.
Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.