It's not every morning that you wake up looking down at Independence Hall. It just happens to be the room you got at the cheaper option on a hotel discount app when swinging by the Constitution Center for the Becket Fund's annual dinner. For the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this is the place to be for an organization — a ministry, really — dedicated to keeping America free, defending religious liberty in court, and fighting for the rights of Americans to believe or not to believe.
Last night, I was at an old, reliable daily Mass in town, at St. John the Evangelist in Center City. At the same time, not too far from Walt Disney World, the Catholic bishops of the United States were consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a moving feast in the Catholic Church, although it always occurs on a Friday in June. Four years ago, it also happened to be the day that the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was issued by the Supreme Court, authored by one of the Catholic justices, Samuel Alito. Nothing could be more fitting.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart stems from apparitions that a French nun, now known as Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, had of Jesus in the 1670s. She reported him saying: "My divine heart is so inflamed with love for men, and for you in particular, that, no longer able to contain in itself the flames of its ardent charity, it must pour them out through you and be manifested to them, in order to enrich them with its precious treasures which I now reveal to you."
If we are ever going to even come close to ending abortion in America, we have to live out of that love, united to that love. That's the stuff of miracles. And it's why we pray — we need miracles!
"The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless ones," Pope John Paul II said at the Detroit airport as he was about to leave the U.S. in 1987. "America the beautiful! So you sing in one of your national songs," he said. "Yes, America, you are beautiful indeed, and blessed in so many ways," including, he added, "in how you serve, and in how you keep alive the flame of hope in many hearts."
There are at least 20 babies born because of the work of Bella Health and Wellness in Denver, which the Becket Fund defended when the state tried to stop them from using a simple abortion-pill-reversal-hormone protocol. These particular children are alive because their mothers heard about Bella through the court case. God writes straight with crooked lines, they say, and so it is.
"Do not forget what took place here over two centuries ago," Pope Francis said while at Independence Hall in September 2015. "Do not forget that Declaration which proclaimed that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that governments exist in order to protect and defend those rights." Those renewed prayers to the Heart of Jesus can't hurt us in this cause. No natural means can be more powerful in showing us the love that saves. The love that God bled for us. The love we need to be who we are as a nation — with the right to believe or not to believe.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.