The gospel of Jesus Christ, to which we all strive to bear witness in our personal and professional lives, is the gospel of life and the gospel of welcome. God gives us life, both human and divine, and welcomes us into His Body.
We receive this incomprehensible gift with gratitude, and we also realize that it brings with it a serious, far-reaching obligation: “Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:17). “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another” (1 John 4:11).
Indeed, this logical and supernatural connection between the love of God and love of neighbor is most fundamentally expressed in the second of the two greatest commandments: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39).
While most think of that to mean, “Love your neighbor to the same extent that you love yourself,” we can perhaps better understand it to mean, “Love your neighbor as a person like yourself.”
In other words, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the differences that exist between your neighbor and you make your neighbor less valuable than you, or less of a person than you.
Recognize in your neighbor a person like yourself: made in God’s image and endowed with the same human rights as you, starting with life itself.
Such love drives out discrimination, beginning with what Pope St. John Paul II called “the most unjust of discriminations,” abortion (see Evangelium Vitae, 20).
Love also drives out all traces of racism and welcomes our neighbors despite any racial differences. In fact, as our Priests for Life colleague and board member Alveda King never tires of saying, “We are one race — the human race.”
In my work, I minister God’s welcome to the unborn as the newest pastoral associate of Priests for Life. I am also a Josephite priest, and the mission of our community, St. Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart, is precisely to serve the African-American community.
The work of Legatus can likewise foster this twofold work of the gospel as our black brothers and sisters find welcome in the business community, whether as executives or employees.
Such welcome, experienced in just wages — and in the opportunity to climb the corporate ladder as a result not of some artificial equity, but as a result of hard work — is refreshing to a community in which the wounds of segregation are often still far too fresh.
Our black brothers and sisters furthermore appreciate the mentoring and the encouragement extended to them in the Christian business community especially as they face circumstances that make home and family life particularly challenging.
And in that regard, we continue to see the unfortunate reality that the black community is targeted by the abortion industry. Though African-American women make up about 13 percent of the childbearing population, they have about a third of the abortions.
This is not due to a lack of reverence for life, but in part because of the racism which is at the root of the abortion industry. In recent years, even representatives of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion cartel, explicitly acknowledged the racist roots of their organization in Margaret Sanger.
The trauma of abortion renews the pain in the psyche of the black community that originally flows from slavery and segregation. Those evils, combined with abortion, are a painful denial of personhood.
We have the opportunity daily to counteract that with words and actions that affirm our black brothers and sisters, born and unborn, in the dignity they possess from God and in our common call to welcome and serve one another.