Vatican City, Oct 31, 2024 / 15:10 pm
Pope Francis received in audience on Wednesday members of “Project Hope,” a program of accompaniment for the spiritual and emotional healing of women and men who suffer the consequences of having chosen abortion.
The members of the initiative, which has spread to most Latin American countries, aim to help those who seek “reconciliation and forgiveness” and experience God’s mercy.
Since 1999, these “companions” — whom the Holy Father referred to as “angels” — have been caring for the “other victims of abortion,” those who have decided to end the lives of their children.
Project Hope came about from women and also men asking for help “with tears in their eyes and expressing the need to know how to cope with unbearable pain.”
The goal of the project is to help the parents work out their grief “with the help of trained professionals and through an approach of acceptance, understanding, and confidentiality, which seeks to facilitate the encounter of the mother and father with their child who was the victim of an abortion.”
Suffering is ‘indescribable’
During the Oct. 30 audience at the apostolic palace in the Vatican, Pope Francis expressed his joy at receiving those who for 25 years have been accompanying women whose suffering, according to the pontiff, “is indescribable.”
For the Holy Father, “the arrival of each newborn is often synonymous with a joy that overwhelms us in a mysterious way and that renews hope.”
“It’s as if we perceived, without knowing how to explain it, that every child announces the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, of God’s desire to make his dwelling in our hearts,” he added.
Looking at the Scriptures, Pope Francis said the Lord “wanted us to share in a pain that, because it is the antithesis of that joy, shocks us brutally.”
“A cry is heard in Ramah, sobbing and bitter weeping: Rachel is weeping for her children, and she refuses to be consoled for her children — they are no more!” the Holy Father read.
The first cry, Pope Francis said, quoting an ancient author, “referred to children, the holy innocents, and their pain ceased with death, while the bitter weeping was the lament of mothers that is always renewed when they remember.”
He also referred to the flight to Egypt of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph due to Herod’s order to kill newborns to explain “that such a great evil drives Jesus away from us, prevents him from entering our home, from having a place in our inn.”
‘Evil doesn’t have the last word’
“But we must not lose hope,” the pope reminded. “Evil does not have the last word; it is never definitive. Like the angel in St. Joseph’s dream, God announces to us that, after this desert, the Lord will return to take possession of his house.”
The pontiff also commented that the people who are part of Project Hope are like “that angel.”
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“I truly thank you for it,” he said.
He also invited them to trust “in the firm hand of St. Joseph so that these sisters of ours can find Jesus in their desolation.”
“With him they will reach the warm and safe home of Nazareth, where they will experience inner silence and the peaceful joy of seeing themselves welcomed and forgiven in the bosom of the Holy Family,” he concluded.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
