Spiritual Adoption of an Unborn Child
Each January 22, all dioceses of the United States observe “a day of prayer for the full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life and of penance for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion.” A past abortion surfaces especially when the mother is in hospice care – the conscience cannot forget. So, we pray for child and mother and for all who pressure the mother into abortion. Here is a prayer by Fulton Sheen that I’ve said every day since 2002: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I love you very much. I beg you to spare the life of the unborn baby that I have spiritually adopted who is in danger of abortion. [Name the baby.] Jesus, may Your peace and Your love embrace the hearts, minds and souls of the family, friends and loved ones who encourage this abortion and lead them all to Your Sacred and Eucharistic Heart.”
Game Changers – Car, Internet and Smartphone
I was introduced to a very interesting book, Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois, by James Krohe, Jr. The author describes how towns that grew rapidly after the Civil War – Danville, Decatur, Galesburg – lost population rapidly after 1970. Then the car enabled people to live in small towns and commute into big towns for work. Then add the inventions of the Internet and the smartphone (which 91% of Americans own) and we can see how our downtown areas emptied out. Modern inventions make it common for people to work from home, too. Here is how Krohe puts it:
“Paradoxically, the automobile, having eviscerated so many isolated rural small towns, is saving many others that happen to lie within convenient driving distances of larger places offering jobs. Small-towners began driving into the cities every morning to work, and city people moved into small towns within commuting distance every evening to sleep. The more vigorous the local economy of these suburbanizing cities, the more energetically is settlement pushed out into the countryside. Its effects are especially plain around the mid-Illinois cities of Springfield, Bloomington-Normal, and Champaign-Urbana. Departing from the regional trend, these cities grew (albeit modestly) once they made a successful transition to more service-based economies based on health care, insurance, distribution, retailing, higher education, and government services.”
“Many a dying farm town now welcomes suburbanites as their great-grand-parents welcomed settlers. These new pioneers arrive in SUVs rather than wagons, but they find in these once-dying towns the same attractions that appealed to their predecessors, mainly cheap land on which one could build a house and raise a family, only now the farmstead is a fenced-in backyard, the livestock pets, and the crop grass. In suburbanizing farm towns such as Sadorus and Savoy and many others, chances are good that the guy in the next booth at the diner talking about his new John Deere is describing not a combine harvester but a riding mower.”
~Fr Loftus