Roe's Demise a time to celebrate, be grateful, honor the Sacred Heart

“FOR TRULY, I SAY TO YOU, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”

Those are the words of our Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 13:17. He is describing the good fortune of those who were alive when the long-awaited Messiah was finally among us.

Pro-lifers experienced something like that feeling on June 24, 2022, when Roe v. Wade was finally overturned. This is what we have marched for, worked for, voted for, and prayed for these past 49 years. We are fortunate to have been alive on the day that it finally happened.

For 35 of those 49 years, I have been a pro-life activist behind enemy lines here in deep-blue Connecticut. Even post-Roe, abortion remains legal here. For states like ours, the battle will continue for many more years.

Nevertheless, this is a time of great joy. After a half-century of struggle on behalf of the unborn child, there is a lot to process in the aftermath of this monumental victory. Here are my three most immediate takeaways.

We should celebrate. Yes, of course the battle is not fully won. Yes, of course we must be even more attentive to the needs of mothers in crisis or risk ending up in a worse place.

And yes, of course we should not gloat.

But there is a difference between celebrating and gloating. We have every right to celebrate. And we should.

A lot of us have suffered too. We deserve the joy of a hard-fought win. Anyone with the slightest insight into human psychology ought to be able to understand that.

We are not machines. We need moments like this. It’s what life is all about.

We should be grateful. Political disagreements and varying loyalties exist even among pro-lifers. Whatever you may think of them, there is no way Roe v. Wade would have been overturned without Sen. Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump. Both of them.

It took extraordinary courage for McConnell to keep Scalia’s seat vacant for a year. Likewise, Trump was the only pro-life president who completely delivered in putting justices on the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe.

We can debate the merits of the “Biden Rule” or the events of January 6. But we should always be grateful to these two men for accomplishing what no one else did.

We should honor the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The 24th of June in 2022, the day Roe was overturned, was the Feast of the Sacred Heart.

There is a message in that for us.

The Sacred Heart was the banner to which Catholics in 19th-century France rallied in fighting back against an anti-clericalist government. This was the same intensely devotional Catholic milieu that produced the likes of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and her family of saints.

The Sacred Heart can play the same role for us in 21st-century America that it played in 19th-century France, in battling the anti-Christian secularism of our own time. We can enthrone His Sacred Heart here too, if we only have faith and persevere.

Most importantly, we can do it by enthroning the Sacred Heart in our own hearts — by becoming our own St. Thérèse of Lisieux, by making our family, like hers, a family of saints too.

Celebrate. Be grateful. Honor the Sacred Heart.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartfod-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of scoiety. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis, Columbia, the National Catholic Register, Catholic Vote, and Ethika Politika.