Pro-Life Pilgrimage

What a pro-life pilgrimage is, and why Catholics make one

A pro-life pilgrimage is prayer with a destination. A pilgrim who cares about the smallest and most fragile human lives takes that care to a holy place and puts it before God: at Mass, in the Rosary, in confession, and in intercession for particular people by name. The U.S. bishops describe pilgrimage itself as "a prayerful and sacrificial journey for a special intention," and this is the intention.

Catholics are drawn to it for different reasons. Some come in thanksgiving for a child. Some are waiting for one. Some carry a loss. Some serve mothers and children in their work and want prayer underneath it. It is not a rally. There are no candidates, parties or campaigns in it, and no one is asked to account for their past.

The Catholic foundation: the Gospel of life

St. John Paul II opened his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae with a plain sentence: "The Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus' message." He described the letter as "a precise and vigorous reaffirmation of the value of human life and its inviolability." The Catechism states the principle without qualification: "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception," and it notes that the Church has taught this since the first century.

This conviction comes from the Incarnation before it comes from any argument. The Son of God became man in the womb of Mary at Nazareth. At the Visitation, the unborn John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth's womb at the presence of the unborn Christ (Luke 1:41-44). A pilgrim who prays the Joyful Mysteries is praying the foundation of this whole pilgrimage: God Himself was once a child waiting to be born.

The same Catechism paragraph that names the gravity of abortion adds that the Church "does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy." Truth about life and mercy toward persons belong together, and a pilgrimage of this kind has to carry both.

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the unborn: what the Church has said

Our Lady of Guadalupe is widely invoked for unborn children and is often called their patroness or protectress. It is worth being exact about the basis. In Ecclesia in America (1999), John Paul II recalled that she is invoked as "Patroness of all America and Star of the first and new evangelization" and welcomed the bishops' proposal that her feast be kept throughout the continent on December 12. Preaching at her basilica on 23 January 1999, he said that "the time has come to banish once and for all from the continent every attack against life," and asked for "life with dignity for all," naming first "all who have been conceived in their mother's womb."

The next day, 24 January 1999, at Mass with the faithful of Mexico at the Hermanos Rodríguez racetrack in Mexico City, he went further. "Under her motherly care," he said of Our Lady of Guadalupe, "I place the young people of this country, as well as the innocent lives of children, especially those who are in danger of not being born." He went on to entrust "the cause of life to her loving protection." These words were spoken across the city from Tepeyac, not in the basilica. Pope Francis recalled the entrustment on her feast in 2018 and remarked that in the image one can see she is with child, awaiting the Saviour.

The bishops of the United States address her in a published prayer as "Patroness of unborn children." We have not found a decree of the Holy See that confers this title or the title Protectress of the Unborn. It is a devotional title, and it rests on a pope's act of entrustment, on later papal words, on the bishops' prayer and on long popular devotion. The dark sash at her waist is commonly read as a sign that she is with child; that is a reading of the image, not a defined teaching, but it helps to explain why so many expectant mothers, and so many grieving ones, have gone to Tepeyac.

Why Mexico: Tepeyac first, then the country around it

The purpose of this pilgrimage is met at Tepeyac. That is where the image is, where St. Juan Diego was canonized in 2002, and where John Paul II's entrustment of the cause of life belongs. A pilgrim who went no further would have made the pilgrimage. St. Juan Diego has a place of his own in it: when John Paul II canonized him, he prayed to him for families, "Bless families, strengthen spouses in their marriage, sustain the efforts of parents to give their children a Christian upbringing."

The other stops are Catholic Mexico, and we say so plainly. Puebla offers a chapel built for the Rosary. Cholula has a Marian sanctuary on a pyramid. Atotonilco, near San Miguel de Allende, is a house of penance founded in the eighteenth century. None of them is a shrine of prayer for unborn children, and no pope has tied any of them to the cause of life. They are on the route because the faith that took root in this country around Our Lady of Guadalupe can be seen in them, and because the Rosary, penance and mercy are what a pilgrimage for life is made of.

Cholula asks for honesty. The sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios stands on the Great Pyramid, which Guinness lists as the largest pyramid in the world by volume, though Giza is far taller. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History says the mound had been abandoned for about eight centuries when the Spanish arrived in 1519, and Britannica notes that they took it for a natural hill. The same institute's account tells of the massacre carried out in the city by Cortés, which it calls one of the cruelest recorded. A hermitage was begun on the summit in 1594, and the present church is a rebuilding of the nineteenth century. A pilgrim does not have to resolve that history in order to pray there; it is enough not to look away from it.

The witnesses: St. Gianna and those who served life

St. Gianna Beretta Molla (1922-1962) was a physician, wife and mother from Magenta, near Milan. As the Holy See's biography tells it, two months into her fourth pregnancy she was found to have a uterine fibroma. She asked the surgeon to save the child's life, and shortly before the birth she insisted that if a choice had to be made, the child should be chosen. Her daughter Gianna Emanuela was born on 21 April 1962; Gianna died a week later, aged 39. John Paul II canonized her on 16 May 2004, calling her "a simple, but more than ever, significant messenger of divine love."

Her witness is often flattened into a single decision. The Pope's homily points somewhere wider: a "holy mother of a family" who "remained heroically faithful to the commitment she made on the day of her marriage." She is a saint of ordinary married love, of medicine practiced as a mission, and of motherhood and fatherhood shared with her husband Pietro. Bold Pilgrim closes this page by asking her prayers as a devotional choice; no decree of the Church assigns her a patronage that we could find. No place on the Mexican route is connected with St. Gianna; she is on this pilgrimage in its prayer, and a journey to her home ground near Milan is described among the other ways to make it.

Others stand beside her. St. John Paul II gave the Church Evangelium Vitae. St. Teresa of Calcutta was praised at her canonization for her "welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded." St. Joseph took the Child and His mother by night to protect them (Matthew 2:13-15). The Holy Innocents, the children of Bethlehem killed by Herod, are honored by the Church as martyrs on December 28.

For those who carry a loss: the Church's own words

Many people who are drawn to this pilgrimage are carrying a loss: a miscarriage, a stillbirth, a child who died young, or an abortion. They belong here. On questions this tender, this page lets the Church speak in her own words and leaves the rest to a priest.

Of children who have died without Baptism, the Catechism (no. 1261) says: "the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them," and it adds that the mercy of God and Jesus' tenderness toward children "allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation" for them.

On abortion, Pope Francis wrote in Misericordia et Misera (no. 12) that "abortion is a grave sin," and in the same passage: "there is no sin that God's mercy cannot reach and wipe away when it finds a repentant heart seeking to be reconciled with the Father." He asked every priest to be "a guide, support and comfort to penitents." The Catechism, for its part, says the Church "does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy" (no. 2272).

Anyone for whom this is personal is invited to speak with a priest, in confession or outside it. In the United States the Church also has a ministry for those who have been involved in an abortion, Project Rachel Ministry, which the U.S. bishops describe as a diocesan-based network. A pilgrimage does not replace a priest or the sacrament of Reconciliation, and Bold Pilgrim does not make judgments about anyone's situation.