Parliament is due to return September 18. In the past six years of praying, fasting and witnessing on Parliament Hill some of the victories I have noticed are these:

  • The defeat of Bill C-43, the essentially flawed abortion bill passed by the Mulroney government at the end of May 1990, by a 43-43 tie vote in the Senate at the end of January 1991. This was a great encouragement early on in this vigil on the Hill.
  • The decisive defeat of that government in 1993 under the leadership of Kim Campbell who was the hardline pro-abortion Minister of Justice when Bill C-43 was being debated and passed.
  • In the same election the loss of official party status of the federal NDP under the leadership of Audrey McLaughlin, another hardline pro-abortionists in an equally hardline pro-abortion party.
  • On the provincial level, the decisive defeat this past June of the rabidly pro-abortion Ontario NDP government under the leadership of Bob Rae and his Minister of Justice, Attorney General Marion Boyd.
  • And finally the defeat of the pro-abortion and de-population proponents at the United Nations Conference last September in Cairo by the much small contingent of pro-life lobbyists and delegates.

All these and many more incidents and events can be seen as victories.

But the greatest, most important and most difficult victories will always be those victories within each human heart.

It is these individual conversions that are most at the heart of God’s concerns. This struggle within ourselves for the ascendancy of God in our lives, without which life truly is not worth living.

If all the best and most just structures were to miraculously be put into place and yet minds and hearts remained unchanged, not turned to God the Creator of all, then the war that God is most interested in, the war waged by Satan and Christ for each of our immortal souls, including those of our enemies, such as Henry Morgentaler, is still won.

“Our hearts are made for You, O God, and they will have no rest until they rest in You” (St. Augustine).

Help us, Lord, to do what you ask, to do what You command. You say to us in Matthew 22:37-28: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.”

Love implies trust, and until we are totally committed to God by trusting that all things are in His hands, our efforts are without foundation.

This is what we are called to, not just for God’s sake but for our own. Our happiness and our peace lie in this. We are made for God and will have no happiness or rest or achieve anything at all until we rest and trust in Him.

This is the “one thing necessary.” God will not be content with less even though He is very patient and understanding of our weakness and slowness, our fickleness and our infidelity. He wants our hearts, our total trust.

We are like children, naïve and easily led astray, vulnerable. God knows and understands this much better than we do. We have a hard time recognizing this and an even harder time acknowledging it in our pseudo-sophisticated, spiritually deficient society.

Let us then continue on our way in the hand of God, or the hand of Mary, or the hand of our guardian angel, or all of the above, trusting that all is unfolding as it should in our own lives and in the life of the universe. God has all in hand.

Perhaps God is allowing all this terrible tragedy and mess, all the holocausts and wars and depravity of this century, to allow time and undeniable evidence to show us and to the most hardened pro-abortionists that without Him, without God, we simply self-destruct.

Doesn’t a child often only learn by trial and error? How much more a sinful, wilful and evil generation?

Is this not perhaps what God’s word is saying to us in Romans 11:32?

“God has imprisoned all men in their own disobedience, only to show mercy to all mankind.”

What a more convincing way of showing us our need for God and for divine intervention in our affairs than through the dismal failure of our trying to build a world, a culture, without Him?

A culture without God is truly a culture of death.

(This month, Fr. Tony Van Hee began the seventh year of fasting and witnessing on Parliament Hill while the House sits.)