On Religion: March For Life Opens Up Complex Questions In Changing Times
(ANALYSIS) The questions at the 2025 March for Life were familiar ones for D.C. Beltway insiders: Would major politicians show up, and what would they say?
After a White House race in which his softer abortion language worried conservatives, President Donald Trump's video message affirmed: “To all of the very special people marching today in this bitter cold, I know your hearts are warm and your spirits are strong because your mission is just very, very pure: to forge a society that welcomes and protects every child as a beautiful gift from the hand of our Creator.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, appeared in person and stressed the need to be “pro-family and pro-life in the fullest sense of that word ... Let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, in deeply personal remarks, stressed that he was born just before Roe v. Wade — and this timing was more than symbolic.
“I was the product of an unplanned teen pregnancy," he told the rally crowd, "and I am so eternally grateful that my mom and dad ignored all the people who told them to just 'take care' of that problem, and they chose to embrace life and to have me, the first of their four children. It's a simple fact -- a very simple fact -- that had they not done that, I would not be here.”
This was the third national March for Life since the Supreme Court vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the Jan. 24 event was affected by harsh winter weather that, days earlier, moved the presidential inauguration ceremonies inside the Capitol. Nevertheless, organizers estimated that the rally and march drew about 150,000 people, including busloads of students.
The vigil mass the night before the march packed the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception with more than 5,000 students, adults and activists, gathered in a variety of worship spaces inside the basilica since the upper-sanctuary pews hold about 3,500 people. Hundreds gathered in the church's crypt, as well as in the Marian shrines in the sanctuary.
As with the rally on the National Mall, the main theme was that the sanctity of human life is an issue that is too complex, and too important, to be discussed in political terms alone.
The vigil homilist was Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, who concelebrated the mass with four cardinals and 21 other bishops. Naumann has served seven terms on the Committee on Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, including one term as chairman.
The preacher scheduled for the vigil was Bishop Daniel E. Thomas of Toledo, Ohio, who was absent due to a death in his family. Thus, Archbishop Naumann's sermon included several passages from notes prepared by Thomas.
Thomas wrote: “We encounter Jesus preeminently in the fragile flesh of the defenseless baby in the womb. We encounter Jesus in the fragile flesh of those born with physical and mental disabilities. We encounter the flesh of Jesus in the fragile flesh of the persecuted, the victim, the immigrant poor and the needy. We encounter the flesh of Jesus in the vulnerable elderly, the imprisoned, the addicted, the depressed, the anxious, the fearful, the dying.”
Addressing the students, Naumann said it's crucial to find hope during what social scientists have called “epidemics of anxiety, loneliness, depression and despair.”
It's understandable, he added, that many young people support abortion rights, since "they have grown up in a culture where they've never known anything but legalized abortion — a culture of death. ... They've grown up in a culture where we, my generation, has failed to protect them from a pornography industry that targets children and young people to addict them to pornography, to this phony and this false kind of love.”
Rather than lose hope, the archbishop urged the assembled young people to “be witnesses to your peers. ... Let us take up the banner to be pilgrims of hope, intent on building a culture of life and a civilization of love.”
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.