Human Life International president urges priests to pray at abortion clinics

By Mary Ann Wyand

When priests join pro-life supporters to pray the rosary outside abortion clinics, their presence helps save babies’ lives, Father Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International in Front Royal, Va., said after the monthly Helpers of God’s Precious Infants Mass on Oct. 15 at St. Michael the Archangel Church in Indianapolis.

“The culture of death is a culture in which death has become institutionalized,” Father Euteneuer said in his homily.

“Killing has become a routine, a way of life,” he said. “That’s a very serious degradation of what culture is supposed to be about. Culture is supposed to … integrate into the very fabric of our lives truth and beauty and life.

“We have the opposite and, in fact, the people that we’re going to meet at that abortion mill are the people whose lives have been destroyed by this degradation, whose lives have been emptied out of faith oftentimes, whose lives have been filled with demons,” Father Euteneuer said. “Let’s just say it for what it is. These people are brought to that clinic by a horde of demons that want one thing—to kill that baby, to destroy that life. And we’re going there to say [expectant mothers] have an alternative.”

Pro-life work is the work of light, he said, in a secular culture of darkness.

“We bring the light to the darkness and the darkness disappears,” he said. “… Does that mean that every woman is going to decide not to have an abortion and run out of that clinic? No. I wish it were the case. … What will happen is that those who are making that particular choice are going to think about it long and hard. Some will choose it and others will be enlightened after their choice. Others will think before they act. Others will turn away when they see us there. Others will have a conversion of heart. We don’t know, and that’s entirely up to God. Our work is to be the missionaries of life.”

Christians need to proclaim their faith and witness the Gospel messages, he said, in a world that desperately needs it.

“We need to live out what we believe,” Father Euteneuer said. “That is our way of being missionaries to [work to end] the darkness. The darkness isn’t always located in just one place, like in an abortion clinic. The darkness is really, more than anything, in people’s hearts. So we become missionaries by living out our faith and bringing that light wherever we go and never being ashamed of what we believe. … We go out as missionaries and give what we have been given, and then we let the Holy Spirit do the rest of the work.” †