CHICAGO (ChurchMilitant.com) – A prominent pro-life group in the Windy City is sending out an all-points bulletin to Chicagoans to participate in its spring campaign.
Joe Lazar
The Chicago chapter of 40 Days for Life invites pro-lifers throughout the region to join in peaceful all-day prayer vigils in front of local abortion facilities. This campaign runs every day except Sundays from Feb. 14 to March 24.
Each day pro-lifers of all faiths are invited to join in prayer from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. outside the American Women’s Medical Center in Chicago. Interested parties can sign up at the campaign website to schedule prayer times.
Campaign leader Joe Lazar, an Illinois pro-lifer and faith network leader for Vision2020, urges anyone who can join in to do so. In an email to Church Militant, he said:
On these days, Our Blessed Lord offers us another chance to rebuild what Illinois has tragically destroyed — the security God created in the womb of every mom for her child. Will you join other prayer warriors at the designated sites?
Each day offers another chance to repair Illinois. Will you help rebuild it?
And in a one-line summation of why people must join in, he added, “Worse than the babies being killed are people doing nothing about it.”
For anyone in the Chicago area still unswayed about the importance of joining in, the ardent pro-lifer set out a few more persuasion points. According to Lazar:
Illinois had over 56,000 abortions in 2022 — a 43% increase in just 5 years.
Illinois has less than one-third the population of California (about 39 million), which is usually considered the largest abortion haven. However, Illinois has more than one-third as many abortions as California. Illinois is leading the way in abortions at this point per capita. This is likely because it is surrounded by mostly pro-life states and invites vulnerable moms to still come and receive a free abortion.
The majority of abortion clinics in Illinois are in Chicago. Despite Chicago being the third largest diocese in the United States, pro-life activity is extremely low. Most Catholic churches no longer have Respect Life ministries. Even the archdiocese itself has renamed its Respect Life office the Office of Human Dignity and Solidarity. The willingness of the Chicago archdiocese to reduce abortion to the magnitude of other issues, such as immigration, etc., has diluted the treachery of rampant legalized human sacrifice.
Most Catholic Churches in Chicago rarely speak about the evil of abortion and other anti-family counterparts (contraception, IVF, surrogacy, etc.). Many Catholics have been led to believe that abortion should be at the most, safe, legal and rare. They don’t see themselves as people living amid the largest human genocide on record.
Even many good pro-life people believe that abortion is so normalized that bold public witness is simply a waste of time. … I believe God is waiting for His people to take the same risks that the Israelites did under Pharoah. He wants His people to boldly rebuke this abomination publicly and make reparation for what we’ve allowed. Only then, I suspect, will He rid our land of abortion.
40 Days for Life Chicago is not Lazar’s only pro-life initiative.
In addition to the 40-day vigils, the renowned pro-lifer coordinates “sidewalk counseling” outside the abortuaries for arriving mothers and couples. He told Church Militant that from his own experience, he estimates “up to 20% of the expectant mothers are uncertain about their decision to abort their unborn babies.”
“They just need a simple reminder of their options,” he says. “This one thing can save the life of a baby.”
Lazar, a husband and busy home-schooling father of two, orchestrates yet one more way to fight against more babies being murdered in the womb.
Every First Saturday throughout the year, Lazar organizes one-hour prayer sessions at designated abortion sites. He says, “We need prayer warriors to come out on Saturdays and consistently show God that we are serious about repairing Illinois’ massive divergence from sanity and morality.”
Lazar says these monthly Saturday devotions honor Our Lady’s mandate to the three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. To Lucia, the oldest of the three children, the Blessed Mother said, “I come to ask … that on the First Saturday of every month, communions of reparation be made in atonement for the sins of the world.”
The Chicago pro-life campaign is up against a powerful Democrat pro-abortion machine.
In the Land of Lincoln, abortion is legal for any reason until fetal viability, around 24-26 weeks of pregnancy. Viability is defined as when a baby can survive outside the mother.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill.
In 2019, Democrat governor J.B. Pritzker signed a law making the right to murder one’s unborn baby “a human right.” In 2021, he repealed the parental notification act. In 2023, he signed a sweeping so-called reproductive rights protections into law.
Since the Dobbs ruling in 2022, women seeking to abort their babies have been flooding to Illinois from states where abortion is no longer legal. Planned Parenthood claims the volume of women seeking abortions in Illinois from other states has risen from 100 per month to 750.
The Catholic Church has steadfastly stood against abortion throughout the ages.
The earliest surviving catechism (A.D. 70) teaches: “You shall not procure abortion nor destroy a newborn child.”
In the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope St. John Paul II declared that the Church’s teaching on abortion “is unchanged and unchangeable.” The sainted pontiff added:
By the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his successors … I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.
Lazar makes his final pitch, saying, “The only way to return to a sane Christian culture is on our knees.”
For information about 40 Days for Life Chicago, click here. To sign up for a First Saturday prayer hour, click here. For general information about 40 Days for Life, click here. For additional inquiries, email Joe Lazar at vision2020cc@gmail.com.
