Years ago, I conceived the idea of having a day where we would invite people nationwide to pray at the graves of aborted babies.
I had presided over may funerals of aborted babies, such as this one in Detroit, or the large one we held at Mother Angelica’s Shrine in 2008. I always saw the impact these ceremonies had on the participants. It was sanity in the midst of insanity. It was a proper response to children who had been killed, rather than a twisted celebration of a “reproductive right” that doesn’t exist.
So what if we brought people together at all these gravesites, and could draw attention to them by means of a special day each year?
I took this idea to other national pro-life leaders and this led to the creation of the National Day of Remembrance, which will again be celebrated on Saturday, September 14, 2024. This event honors the bodies and memory of our brothers and sisters killed by abortion, and calls on pro-life Americans to gather at the gravesites of these children.
Solemn prayer vigils will be conducted at these gravesites as well as hundreds of other sites dedicated in memory of aborted children. Visiting the burial places of these children cuts through any rhetoric surrounding abortion and moves this conversation from the abstract into concrete reality.
After all, we have burial services not for “concepts,” but for human persons.
And when we gather for these services, we express the mourning that should mark the lives and hearts of all who seek to build a culture of life. Pro-life activism begins with a broken heart; it begins when we can mourn the killing of the children we could not save. “Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said, “for they will be comforted” (Mt. 5:4).
Over the years I have been blessed to lead many of these services, including at the gravesite of babies killed by notorious abortionist Kermit Gosnell, and the service in 2014 was at the grave of 16,433 babies killed by abortion!
At www.
LifeNews.com Note: Frank Pavone is the national director for Priests for Life.
