Are Pro-Life Leaders In Canada Afraid To Speak The Truth?

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
Abraham Lincoln

Recently, Vote Life, Canada! took to task Bishop Frederick Henry of Calgary for his decision to suppress the GAP display of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR). In an Open Letter to the Bishop, Vote Life, Canada! expressed its alarm at the Bishop's judgment and proposed an explanation for Bishop Henry's misguided and hostile action to the cause of the Unborn. To date, not only the Bishop but the entire pro-life community has been silent on this Open Letter.

Apparently silence is the preferred method of response by all those leaders in Canada who are self-described defenders of Unborn children. There was virtual silence in the Canadian pro-life community when Bishop Henry issued his edict against CCBR, an organization dedicated to boldly proclaiming, both visually and verbally, the atrocity of abortion.

Can we attribute the same dedicated opposition to abortion by the Catholic Bishops of Canada, an assembly of the highest Christian leaders of our nation who, together, cannot seem to make room in Sunday Mass for even a prayer for the Unborn, perhaps occasionally a word or two in a homily in order to keep Canada's gravest injustice before the minds and hearts of the faithful?

Was there even a call by pro-life leaders to Canadian pro-lifers to voice their concerns to Bishop Henry over his ruling against CCBR? To my knowledge if there was such a thought it never passed anyone's lips and certainly never made it to the pro-life newswires. Were pro-life leaders in Canada immobilized with fear due to the Bishop of Calgary's reputation for courageous action? Perhaps the Bishop is considered by the pro-life community to be infallible in his pronouncements, even when said pronouncements further jeopardize and threaten the future of the Unborn.

This indictment is a wake-up call to the pro-life movement in Canada. Every year in Canada over 100,000 unborn children continue to be killed in the womb through the most horrific of methods and no abatement is in sight, yet when a Catholic Bishop makes a decision which sends chills through the whole movement working to expose this massacre for what it is, not one pro-life leader in Canada is bold enough to identify this decision as a hostile move against the Unborn and against the culture of life and to demand the Bishop rescind his order.

Would to God there was a simple explanation for the continued silence in the face of Vote Life, Canada's Open Letter. Perhaps no party wishes to be harsh in their judgment of the letter; after all, politeness is the ultimate Canadian virtue, perhaps equally so for too many pro-lifers. We are permitted to allow mothers to kill their unborn children and may not say impolite things about them or their actions (such as calling the killing of Unborns MURDER. After all, we are told, women are already traumatized enough by abortion and it is legal, so it may not be technically called murder.)

Would to God some leader would have the courage to do SOMETHING, other than to ignore the Open Letter and its contents. Far better to add some clarity to the affair, even at the expense of politeness, with an honest evaluation of the Bishop's decision and the Open Letter, rather than leave the entire pro-life movement wondering where they go from here. Vote Life, Canada! and the author of the letter, Eric Alcock, is ready to be rebuked, and will accept the rebuke, wherever it can be reasonably shown that the response and the accompanying analysis has been made unjustly or in error.

In the meanwhile, the Unborn continue to pay a gruesome price for our silence and evasion.

Not to oppose error is to approve it; and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and indeed to neglect to confound evil men when we can do so is not less a sin than to encourage them. Pope St. Felix III