The Patriarch of Romania sent a message on Monday for the National Conference of the Support Centres for Pregnant Women. The 6th edition of the biannual event is held in Bucharest, Romania, between September 12-13, 2022.
Patriarch Daniel emphasised that we are all called to become the hands of God’s merciful love for unborn children.
Full text:
We are called to become the hands of God’s merciful love for the unborn children
Bucharest’s Association for Pregnant Women and Family Support has organised for three years its biannual National Conference of the Support Centres for Pregnant Women. The goal of this event is to foster the exchange of experience and mutual enrichment in fulfilling a work which is not easy and which is primarily based on solidarity both with its beneficiaries and among those called to fulfil it.
The association has established specialized centres which offer professional services of support for mothers in pregnancy crisis and their unborn children, and it aims to share its experience with all those willing to work on the greatest good: saving mothers’ souls and children’s lives.
The activity of these centres is a concrete example of communion and fulfilment of the divine will, because we, as Christians, see each human person who has been conceived as part of God’s will to work good deeds into the world.
Our Church has recently celebrated the Nativity of the Mother of God, who has been essential in God’s plan of building the Kingdom of Heaven together with man.
The Mother of God gave birth to our Saviour Jesus Christ, despite the fact that she was not married and had devoted herself to spiritual matters. Yet, to the angel who announced that she would conceive from the heavenly Father and through the power of the Holy Spirit, she resolutely answered: “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38).
This shows us that the Mother of God conquered her hesitation and her worries by faithfully abandoning herself to divine providence.
Moreover, the conception and birth of the Holy Virgin Mary from elderly barren parents also show us that every child who comes into the world is fundamentally the fruit of a spiritual work: that of partaking in the life-giving gift which comes exclusively from God, being sourced from the love of the Holy Trinity, and is offered to people.
Thus, Christ discreetly protects the conceiving and birth of every child, who comes into the world after being conceived through the gift of God.
For Christians, giving birth to children never reduces the woman to a purely biological reality; on the contrary, it proves her spiritual force, which resides in her capacity for sacrificial love.
Our pro-life actions become the expression of God’s merciful love and providence and remind the woman of her unique power and vocation: that of giving life.
Yet, most often, overwhelmed by the difficulties they are confronted with, parents – and especially single mothers – do not find it easy to accept the child as a heavenly gift. Then we are entrusted with the mission of restoring their faith in God by becoming ourselves His merciful and loving hands.
When the child’s father does not stand by the pregnant woman to protect her in the most vulnerable moment of her life, when the extended family of the professional environment put great pressure on her to give up the baby in her womb, the woman needs us to stand by her. Our extended hand and our gifts for women in pregnancy crisis rebuild these parents’ trust in God and in people and fulfil God’s plan for the salvation of the world.
The two crisis pregnancy centres established by the Association for Pregnant Women and Family Support are part of an international network whose members benefit from the decade-long American expertise in this field. In the United States, there are hundreds of big abortion clinics.
Meanwhile, there are thousands of crisis pregnancy centres: only in the latest five years, they saved more than 800,000 American children, whose mothers received the support they needed. This experience shows that our involvement counts and it needs to become systematic and professional.
Some dioceses of the Romanian Orthodox Church have created pregnancy support centres, but continuous effort is needed to bring help to mothers in difficulty from every county of Romania.
At present, such centres are functional in only 16 of the 41 counties of Romania and not all are at an optimal development level.
There are many ways in which we can become God’s hands of merciful love into the world. But helping a child to be born is the most generous deed of Christian love, because it does not save only the children’s bodies, but also their souls for the Kingdom of Heaven – and, with them, their mother’s souls, by giving them back their hope.
At the same time, it is a work which redeems us as a community, a work in which individualism is surmounted through an exercise of solidarity according to God’s will.
On this occasion, we wish to express our gratitude to all who help, in word or deed, this work of supporting women in pregnancy crisis.
We also welcome and bless the efforts made by the Romanian organizers of this conference and the professional support offered by their guests from across the ocean, by sharing their experience.
With appreciation and fatherly blessings,
† Daniel
Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church
