Bishop Zubik Asks Pro-lifers To 'connect The Dots' On Life Issues

WASHINGTON (CNS) – Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh urged Mass-goers preparing to rally in Washington for the annual March for Life to "connect the dots" linking all manner of life issues.

            At a Jan. 22 Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Bishop Zubik invoked his fifth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Richard, who "taught me how to be a pro-lifer."

            The nun "did it in an interesting and an unexpected way," he said. "If you have any hopes of getting to the sixth grade," he remembered her saying, "you'd better know more than just the Hail Mary. You'd better know the prepositions" – at which point Bishop Zubik reeled off a string of prepositions in alphabetical order, from "above" to "with." "Needless to say," he added, "I made it to the sixth grade."

            But prepositions, he said in his homily during the Mass, "give sentences their meaning." He added, "Every one of us is called by God to be prepositions in life."

            Bishop Zubik said that while people engage in fasting, often interpreted as giving up something valuable to them, God has no interest in that. Instead, the bishop added, one has to go to the root of the word "sacrifice" -- in Latin, "sacrum facere," or to make holy.

            The way to do that, Bishop Zubik said, is to "connect the dots" of life issues as prepositions connect the key words and phrases in a sentence.

            "To connect the dots in 2016 takes on its own flavor," he said, "to make holy all of life, by connecting the dots to every single person," from the unborn to the born to the elderly, to those "suffering from human trafficking" and those "exploited by pornography," and "to the unemployed and the underemployed, looking not so much for a hand out as a lift up."

            Connecting the dots to all persons is what God intended, Bishop Zubik said, "to see each other as God sees us all."