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Courtesy of Rev. Mr. Séan Paul Fleming - The Diocese of Buffalo was well represented at the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
Troubled times create strong people. The same can be true for a society that has endured 39 years of legalized abortion. Protesters who gave their time for the annual March for Life on Washington, D.C., this year, heard from a woman who has gained strength and knowledge despite a difficult upbringing
Christina King, a chastity/abstinence speaker from Nennah, Wis., spoke about her troubled past and hope for the future to the thousands gathered on Jan. 23 at the Washington Plaza Hotel for a pre-march Mass and breakfast.
A product of a dysfunctional childhood that included sexual abuse and an extended family of drug dealers and Nazis, King believes Divine Providence led her to becoming Catholic. She credits God for her not becoming “crazy.”
Reading Blessed John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” helped form her opinion of herself and her place in the world. She believes the series of documents, written and delivered between 1979 and 1984, were given to the Church at a time when they were needed to transform a culture of death back into a culture of life.
“It is to help us to understand who God is, who we are, and how that fits together,” King said.
“Theology of the Body” addresses the purpose of life, why humans were created as males and females, purity of heart and love.
She reminds people to know God as a loving Father, Who created individuals to bring their unique personhood to the world. “My story will not touch some of you, but your story will touch others,” she said. “That’s how we are going to accomplish (change), through our own stories. That is the beauty of having a unique dignity in each one of our stories. … The very thing, that we think we are not going to effect any change, our woundedness, is our greatest glory and shining ability to convert others around us.”
King sees a sign of hope in the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In 1531, an Aztec convert named Juan Diego witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Mexico City, after Bishop Juan de Zumeraga begged the intercession of Mary during the Spanish Conquest. An image of the apparition contains hidden messages that King believes were meant to be discovered during modern times.
Advanced mathematics, computer software and NASA technology discovered that every constellation that appeared in the sky the morning of the apparition at that latitude and longitude in Mexico is exactly represented in the icon. That discovery would be impossible to create and understand at the time.
Also discovered is an image of Juan Diego and Bishop Zumeraga that, true to life, appears in three places in the cornea of Mary. At the time of the icon’s creation, no one would understand how the human eye works or even notice the images in the icon.
“Why, in an image where everything means something, would there be something you could never have known at that time in history and would never discover until the technology was in existence?” King asked. “I claim that there is a message in the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe for the Church of the 21st century,” she said. “I believe Our Lady of Guadalupe is speaking once again, in a time when our world so parallels what was happening to the Aztec culture, where you have the murder of innocents, you have the loss of the dignity of the human person and a total misunderstanding of who God is.”
Next year will be the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and just as the Israelites spent 40 years in the wilderness, King feels next year will mark a change for the better for the Pro-Life Movement.
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