Yesterday, two thirds of our fellow citizens in this great state of California chose to fund abortions, even from other states, up the moment of birth, which is essentially infanticide.  Proposition One failed miserably in the sense that most of us failed to
protect the weakest in our society from the abortion industry. We voted for the killing of children to a degree matched only by governments such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. This rejection of the natural law will have long term consequences, and we Californians must try to understand what just happened. We have chosen genocide based on age: we have vigorously insisted that an entire part of our human race does not have the right to live.

A similar event took place in Rwanda in 1994. More powerful people decided to kill the less powerful in the race wars between Hutu and Tutsi. To understand how this could have happened, and to understand our own moment in history, I’ve invited a survivor of the Rwandan genocide to speak at our parish. Immaculée Ilibagiza will speak this Friday (day after tomorrow) at 7pm in our auditorium. I became familiar with Rwanda when I wrote a brochure about Our Lady of Kibeho (available at her shrine in our church). She predicted the slaughter of a million people in Rwanda 12 years before it happened. This morning I read an article published on the First Things website, written before Proposition One was decided. Here is an excerpt by the author, John Murdock, who prays every week before an abortion facility in Boise.

“On the sidewalk, my own memory flashes to Rwanda. I was there in 2007 as part of a group from an American congregation with African ties. One of our stops was at a school campus, to which Rwandans had been drawn with promises of safety during the 100 days of death that swept the nation. … A few dozen bodies had been preserved as they were found through a mummification process involving a ghostly white lye. The hope was that no one could look at these corpses and say the genocide never happened. Our guide at the school was a walking testament. He literally had a bullet hole in his forehead. The man had somehow escaped to the woods, but most of his family perished. … I pray and read the psalms by the clinic’s street sign that says ‘Care. No matter what.’ A few feet away is a room where over a thousand people a year have been killed. Will this one day be a memorial? Will school children walk through it with wide eyes, shocked that their ancestors could undertake such barbarity? Or will it simply be repurposed and scrubbed from history? Might the nearby doggie daycare expand so that pets are groomed in the place where human blood was shed?”

Last month, here in San Francisco, I was asked to do an exorcism and blessing for the former Planned Parenthood clinic on Valencia Street, which will be leased to a new tenant. I sprinkled blessed salt and water through six windowless rooms in which thousands had died violent deaths. A group from our parish had been praying every Thursday evening at that building until it closed, and now we pray in front of the new facility on Bush Street, which is much larger and lavishly-funded. Killing is killing. No honest medical professional would deny that the human fetus is a human life, even though political leaders deny this scientific fact day after day.

On this day, when California has made its choice for death, when we will pay to have nine-month-old babies aborted, I encourage you to attend Immaculee’s talk this Friday. She has seen death, and she knows how the more powerful can simply kill the less powerful. Tickets are $25 at the door, and under 18 are free, this Friday, November 11, at 7pm in the auditorium.

The above comes from a Nov. 9 posting on Father Illo’s blog. Father Illo is the pastor of Star of the Sea parish in San Francisco.