Pope Francis to mothers and fathers who aborted: Evil does not have the last word

Today Pope Francis received in audience the members of the “Project Hope”, a support program for the spiritual and emotional healing of women and men who suffer the consequences after choosing abortion.

The members of this initiative, expanded throughout most Latin American countries, help those in need to travel a path “of reconciliation and forgiveness” and experience God’s mercy.

Since 1999, these “accompaniers” — whom the Holy Father referred to as “angels” — have worried about the “other victims of abortion,” those who have decided to end the lives of their children.

For this reason, the “Hope Project” emerged, seeing women and also men asking for help “with tears in their eyes and expressing the need to know how to cope with the unbearable pain.”

Your goal? Help to work through their pain “with the help of trained professionals and through an approach of welcome, understanding and confidentiality, which seeks to facilitate the meeting of the mother and father with that child who was the victim of an abortion.”

The suffering of these mothers and fathers “is indescribable”

During this morning’s audience in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, Pope Francis expressed his joy at receiving these people 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 usually synonymous with a joy that overtakes us in a mysterious way and renews hope.”

“It is as if we perceived, without knowing how to explain it, that each child is an announcement of the Birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, of God’s desire to make a home in our hearts,” he added.

Placing his gaze on the Holy Scriptures, Pope Francis specified that the Lord “wanted to make us participate in a pain that, because it is the antithesis of that joy, shocks us brutally.”

“A cry is heard in Ramah, groans and bitter weeping: Rachel, who weeps for her children, does not want to be consoled, because she is left without them (Jr 31,15)”, the Holy Father read.

The first moan, as Pope Francis stated when quoting an ancient author, “referred to the children, the holy innocents, and their pain ceased with death, while the bitter cry was the lament of mothers that is always renewed with memory.”

He also made reference to the flight to Egypt of the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph due to Herod’s order to murder newborns to explain “that such a great evil distances Jesus from us, prevents him from entering our home, from having a place in our inn.”

“Evil does not have the last word”

“But we must not lose hope, evil does not have the last word, it is never definitive. Like the angel in Saint Joseph’s dream, God announces to us that, after this desert, the Lord will return to take possession of his house,” he stated.

He also indicated that the people who are part of “Project Hope” are like “that angel.” “I really appreciate it,” Pope Francis added.

He also invited them to trust “in the firm hand of Saint Joseph so that these sisters of ours can find Jesus in desolation.”

“With it they will arrive at the warm and safe home of Nazareth, where they will live the inner silence and the peaceful joy of seeing themselves welcomed and forgiven in the bosom of the Holy Family,” he concluded.