For the second year in a row, Springfield Right to Life and the Diocesan Office for Social Concerns is sponsoring a 40 Days for Life campaign outside of Planned Parenthood in Springfield. The campaign will run from Ash Wednesday, Feb. 22 to Palm Sunday, April 1.
The 40 Days for Life campaign in Springfield is just one of many that will run this Lent. It is an international campaign that has taken place in 422 cities all across the United States and Canada, plus in communities in Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Belize, Denmark, England, Georgia, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Puerto Rico and Spain.
Overall, 20 abortion centers have shut down during or following a 40 Days for Life campaign outside their doors, including one in nearby Rockford.
Mary Ellen Hollahan is one of the lead coordinators of the Springfield prayer vigil, which is scheduled to run from 7 a.m. from 7 p.m. daily. She says people are invited to witness and pray peacefully to show their opposition to abortion. Moreover, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki will lead a prayer vigil outside of Planned Parenthood beginning at noon on Tuesday, March 6.
"Last year, the vigil led by Bishop Paprocki was very well attended," Hollahan says. "We're hoping that will be the case this year as well."
"We're encouraging all parishes around the diocese to participate in the prayer and fasting," says Sister Jane Boos, SSND, director of the Office for Social Concerns. "I know that some communities don't have a Planned Parenthood in their area and we have the one abortion clinic in our diocese. However, we still ask everyone to pray for an end to abortion and for the protection of our religious liberty, particularly in light of the HHS (United States Department of Health and Human Services) mandate on contraception coverage and health insurance."
Parishes can help out by organizing groups to take turns praying, Hollahan says. "Last year we had parishes sign people up after Mass for shifts all day on a statement that they "cannot stand by silently" in light of what they called "an unprecedented and untenable abrogation of religious freedom in the United States."
"This is part of a pattern in the United States that has degenerated from the recognition of religion as good and salutary in our society to religion being subjected to punitive discrimination," said the statement signed by Bishops Kevin J. Farrell of Dallas and Kevin W. Vann of Fort Worth and Dallas Auxiliary Bishops J. Douglas Deshotel and Mark J. Seitz.
They urged the nearly 2 million Catholics in North Texas, along with "other people of good will," to join them "by speaking out for the protection of conscience rights and religious liberty that are essential to the common good of our nation and in keeping with the basic human rights enshrined in our American way of life."
Archbishop Aymond, who was in Rome for his ad limina visit to Pope Benedict XVI, said Jan. 26 that he had already sent a letter to members of Congress protesting the HHS decision and now expected the Catholic faithful to take action.
"This is a critical time and one that will call for us to engage in public dialogue," he said. "We cannot stand by and allow this to move forward without speaking out."
Archbishop Aymond said Catholics "must be able to live the message of Christ in the U.S. and follow our conscience."
"We are not demanding that others live our Christian values, but we should have the right to do so," he added.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal Jan. 25, Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the HHS decision rejected the "loud and strong appeals" by "hundreds of religious institutions and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens" since the comment period began last August.
Speaking that evening at Fordham University in New York, the archbishop told reporters that Obama had called him the morning of Jan. 20 "to tell me the somber news" before the HHS decision was announced publicly.
He said he felt "terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed" and found it difficult to reconcile the decision with what the president had told him during a meeting in November — "that he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn't want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard, particularly in the area of health care, education, works of charity and justice."