The Power of Forgiveness

For me, the life and death of Dr. Bernard Nathanson is a testimony to the power of God to change the human heart. During the period of his life from his early adulthood to the 1970's Dr Nathanson was a well known and public figure promoting abortion. After his conversion to Catholicism, nothing seems to have happened in his life. This is not true. The first part of his life including the many unborn fetuses he murdered are a testimony to God's ability to both allow us to commit great evil while at the same time loving us and wanting us to come to him. The second part of his life is a testimony to the fact that God's greatest work is internal, not external. Like it says in the Book of Kings, God comes not as a tempest, or as an earthquake, but as a gentle breeze. It is this gentle breeze that we must seek every day in our lives. The storms of our passions can draw us away from God. I am sure Dr. Nathanson had much to meditate before and after he wrote his biography, focused as it was essentially on his great sinfulness. His movie, the Silent Scream is largely forgotten nowadays but witnesses to the simply biological horror of a living creature being about to be destroyed. How can we be so cold. I just read on the Planned Parenthood web site a promotion of the "sexiness" of getting an abortion. It seems that one of their clientscomes out smiling and says to a man, " I feel wonderful, I should have done that sooner. I would recommend that to anyone. It bets the abortion pill any day. Those chemicals in that are awful. Where do you want to go eat."

Apart from the fact that it is unbelievable that Planned Parenthood both promotes RU-486 and has someone say "Those chemicals in that are awful" it shows how people have disconnected themselves from life and death. This is the major work of Bernard Nathanson, that with others in his lifes work he brought us back to it. He will be a largely unsung hero, I doubt anyone will write his autobiography unlike Steve Jobs. Like Dennis Ritchie he is one of the humble wonders who died in 2011.