Last Friday the world heard the news that the Catholic Church will beatify Pope John Paul II later this year, which is one step closer to the Church formally recognizing that he rests in Heaven.  I suspect that many of my Evangelical friends are well ahead of the Catholic Church in knowing that he is there, in the great cloud of witnesses, adoring his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Before beatification the Catholic Church confirms that a miracle has occurred due to the intercession of the deceased. In Pope John Paul’s case, it is the miraculous cure of a French nun, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease.  This little nun says John Paul was and is an inspiration because of his defense of the unborn child. “John Paul II did everything he could for life, to defend life,” she said. “He was very close to the smallest and weakest. How many times did we see him approach a handicapped person, a sick person?”

It is hard for me to approach another anniversary of Roe v. Wade without thinking of this great man who once said that “a nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope.”  His very life was a witness to the sanctity of all human life. John Paul survived an assassination attempt and immediately forgave his assassin.  He survived the two greatest threats to life and freedom of the 20^th century, Nazi Germany and Communist Totalitarianism, and of that bloody century, said: “The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.”

He dedicated an entire encyclical to abortion and euthanasia, and in the magnificent “Gospel of Life” he minced no words:  “No human law can claim to legitimize” abortion, he said.  We have a “grave and clear obligation to oppose” such laws, even through “conscientious objection.”

Another spiritual leader on her way to saintly recognition, Mother Teresa, was his comrade-in-arms on this issue and equally blunt:  “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation.  The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men.  It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience.”

Imagine the homecoming for these two giants for life: a choir of little ones, in the millions.

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President Obama’s powerful words at today’s National Prayer Breakfast were rightly examined by my dear colleague, Cathy Ruse. How can the same man who wants to force us to pay for the slaughter of innocents seem so convincing? He is surely right to say we must see the face of God in our fellow human beings. We must. Does he?

Abraham Lincoln said it well in 1858. He said the Founders believed that “nothing stamped in the divine image was sent into the world to be trod upon.” Our question to President Obama, with all due respect, is: Are not unborn children so stamped? Can we not see the face of God in their faces?

Lincoln condemned no one in his Second Inaugural, but he said it must seem strange for anyone to ask the help of a just God in wringing his bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Then the President quoted Scripture: Let us not judge lest we be judged. So we must not judge.

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