(Photo: Ana Perucho)
ILOILO City, Feb. 20, 2016 – As the nation observes Pro-life Month this month, a Catholic couple called on the faithful to be more pro-life beginning with the family.
Sharing their married life experience in Candle Light, the official publication of the National Shrine of Our Lady Candles, Mike and Aida Gomez, both members of the Jaro Archdiocesan Commission on Family and Life, affirmed that being pro-life begins in the family.
“Let us try to understand ‘pro-life’ in our own simple way. Where do we start being pro-life? If we eat to live, exercise to stay healthy, we likewise need the heart to give, share, build, and nurture life and that starts in our very own family,” explained the couples.
Pro-life behavior
They also warned family members about attitudes that are not life-giving.
“As parents, do we nag our kids telling them day after day ‘you are no good’ … until they believe it’s true? As children, do we ignore our parents ‘sermons’ even if we know that they are correct and good for us?”, they asked.
While admitting that no family is perfect, the Gomezes encouraged “pro-life behaviors” among parents and children.
They added: “In our family when we praise more and criticize less, correct each other rather than sow mistrust, affirm and appreciate each other’s gifts and uniqueness, forgive and heal wounds that we inflict, accept and embrace the person no matter what, we experience what life and being life-giving truly is.”
The couple talked about how the pro-life advocacy could be strengthened particularly this mont, saying, “Every February is Pro-life Month, reminding us how we as a Church and God’s children can truly be pro-life.”
Not just an advocacy
For the Gomezes being pro-life is not just an advocacy, nor is it just an act of defending physical life only but consists in “respecting human life in all its aspects – mental, emotional, and even ecological”.
“As a Church we defend, protect, nurture, sustain, and give life to each other and to those living around us in a manner that is ‘holistic’ and not like the ‘cafeteria’ mentality – choosing to support only those forms of life that suit or benefit us,” explained the couple.
The couple underscored that life, especially human life, is a God-given gift that the faithful, as a Church and as a community, have the responsibility of protecting.
“God breathed life into us. He gave us free will to enable us to choose life. Any kind of destruction affects the balance of life, a balance God only can create and endow. So, a single action against any form of life has a rippling effect on the rest of society.”
More pro-life parishes, priests
The couple pointed out that Catholics, by being active in their parishes, can help the rest of society live the pro-life way.
“We, as Catholics, have seen the struggles of our parishes to be more life-giving: in their programs of formation, recollections, community services, projects for the poor, etc. which encourage us to develop pro-life attitudes.”
“We wish our priests could preach more often about the sanctity of life and the evils of abortion and also the consequences it entails,” added the couple. (Fr. Mickey Cardenas / CBCP News)
