By Judie Brown
Today is the feast day of Juan Diego, the fellow who said, “I am a nobody, I am a small rope, a tiny ladder, the tail end, a leaf.” Juan Diego was a humble man to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe chose to appear. She told him to go to his bishop and ask that a church be built on the spot where she stood. To ensure his credibility as he stood before the bishop, Our Lady filled Juan’s cloak with fresh roses that appeared in the dead of winter. When Juan Diego unfolded his tilma, the beautiful image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was imprinted on it.
The rest is, as they say, history. Our Lady’s appearance led to thousands of conversions, but at the center of the story is the man who humbly did as Our Lady instructed. On his feast day today, we ask him to intercede for us in our quest to end abortion.
We do this because we know that in his wisdom, Albert Einstein was correct when he said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
In the same way that Saint Juan Diego explained his vision of Our Lady to those who doubted him, we are called to simply and persistently explain that the preborn child is a human being whose life is as valuable as that of her mother’s and father’s. This is so because every person has incalculable value in the eyes of our Creator because each human being is made in His image.
Nothing could be simpler than that. And yet, as is the case with everything in our muddled cultural landscape, people will contradict the simplicity of the truth with convoluted expressions designed to justify every evil under the sun, including the deadly aborting of a baby.
As St. Thomas Aquinas once wrote, “A little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end.” Such is the case with efforts to defend the killing of preborn human beings, thus destroying both our knowledge and understanding of the dignity of the growing baby.
In the clear light of day, anyone who chooses to study the facts about any topic, especially as they pertain to God’s creation of the human being, must choose to either set aside common sense or accept the fact that a distinctly unique human being comes into existence every time a human egg is fertilized by a human sperm.
We have provided multiple resources over the years to help people understand the simple truth that a human embryo is a human being.
Pope John XXIII underscored this fact of life, writing in Mater et Magistra, “Human life is sacred—all men must recognize that fact. From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God. Those who violate His laws not only offend the divine majesty and degrade themselves and humanity, they also sap the vitality of the political community of which they are members.”
Take a moment to study those words and consider this: After Juan Diego approached his doubting bishop, who asked for a sign, Our Lady told him where to find the roses he would gather. She filled his tilma with them, which then created the miraculous image that amazed the bishop—and now the world.
When we approach a doubting culture, sopped as it is with egoism, God fills our hearts with His truth. Then when the hardest of hearts is opened to the truth of God’s creative power embodied in the person of the preborn child, common sense intervenes. Life is affirmed, love replaces doubt, and babies are saved.
Juan Diego may have thought he was a nobody, but Christ and His mother knew better. No one, not even the tiny preborn baby, is a nobody in the eyes of our Lord.
Saint Juan Diego, pray for us.