Saturday 4 October 2008

Memorial to aborted children in church's graveyard

A week ago, Fr Morty O'Shea, SOLT, parish priest, unveiled a memorial to all aborted children in the graveyard of St Mary's Catholic church, Carmarthen, Dyfed. The preacher at a Mass beforehand was Fr Jeremy Davies of the Archdiocese of Westminster. The memorial includes the following quotation from the 10th chapter of St Mark's Gospel: "Let the little children come to me."

Fr O'Shea writes: "[T]he cemetery memorial witnesses to the reality that human life is sacred and that seven million lives taken by surgical abortion alone is something that we cannot ignore. It is time for all people of good will to get involved. If we were to compare the abortion holocaust with the Jewish holocaust, we can see that there is a similarity in terms of the number of human beings who have lost their lives. Similar also is the fact that they all died with ‘legal’ death warrants. But there is one big distinction: the Jews who died in the holocaust will always be remembered. They will have family who will remember them. There will be holocaust memorials and there will be an annual date to commemorate what has happened for a long time to come. The fact that they were born, that they lived and that they died in such circumstances will always be remembered.

"On the other hand, when we look at the aborted babies, the mere fact that these babies ever existed is denied! There is no such thing as a birth certificate, there is no death certificate, there is no funeral service, there is no coffin, there is no grave, there is no headstone, there is no commemoration in the future. The world treats them as nothing more than medical waste. It is as if these infants never lived, never died. This is the ultimate ignominy to inflict on anybody but it is the necessary price to justify the world’s indifference. The memorial in St Mary’s cemetery is thus a solitary and prophetic witness to the abortion holocaust that continues in our midst."

Fr O'Shea adds: "[T]here is no reason why such a memorial could not be erected outside the front of any church."