You and your Christian community can help build a culture of life in Quebec by working with Quebec Life Coalition in one of the following ways:

1. By formulating, during your celebrations, prayer intentions that speak to the issues of life and family, or by mentioning life issues during your sermons or homilies. We at Quebec Life Coalition have resources to help you formulate sermons and prayers that address life issues.
2. By making our monthly newsletters available to your congregation, and by inviting the faithful to read them. We will gladly supply your church with a monthly batch of newsletters at no cost to you.
3. By participating in our public witness activities:
   1. The 40 Days for Life vigil is an international event that takes place twice a year. Since its founding in 2007, it has electrified the pro-life movement (see included flyer). This is an activity that encourages Christians to be true to their calling; it will help the members of your congregation to mature in their faith.
   2. The annual March for Life, which is normally held at the end of the second week of May, is a positive, festive event with many thousands of participants, which will allow your congregation to realize that it is not alone in defending solid Life-affirming values.
   3. Life Chain is a yearly event which is held once a year in as many as 1450 cities all over North America. At each location a group of people, located in a public area, pray for the end of abortion for 90 minutes, and thus form a link in a prayerful “Life Chain” that spans the continent. This simple and effective prayer campaign is also easy to organize.
4. By inviting a Quebec Life Coalition representative to your church to speak about life issues. These presentations can be done after the service, on Saturday afternoons or on a weekday night. Often, believers have good values but have trouble defending these values or even putting them into words. These presentations will equip the faithful in your church and enable them to defend their values in the public square.
5. By “adopting” an abortion facility. Every major city in Quebec has one or more abortion facilities. Montreal, for example, has 21. Chances are that you will find an abortion facility not too far from your church (we have a map that indicates the location of every abortion facility in Quebec). By adopting an abortion facility, you pledge to come out with some of your congregation and pray near that facility as much as possible (once a month, once a week, or even every day). We at Quebec Life Coalition have all the required material: Prayer cards, Bible quotes, signs if you want them, and the phone numbers of the more reliable pregnancy help centres, etc. This activity saves babies and helps parents and abortionists by brining them the compassion and healing of Jesus Christ, right outside the abortion facility.
6. By organizing a Respect Life Weekend – we propose the weekend that is closest to March 25, which is 9 months from Christmas—but any other weekend would do. We furnish the materials (flyers, etc.) and offer step by step instructions on how to make the weekend a success. This is a great first-time pro-life activity for your congregation, and can incorporate many other activities and ideas listed on this suggestion sheet.
7. By participating in our fundraising campaigns:
   1. Coins for Life: We come to your church once or twice a year and distribute to the faithful plastic containers which they bring back home and in which they deposit any loose change they may have at the end of each day. They then bring back to church their full containers, which we pick up when there is a good number of them to collect. This campaign is easy to run and reminds the faithful on a daily basis that they are committed to protecting Life at all its stages.
   2. Real estate for Life: By informing the congregation, by way of the weekly church flyer or by some other means, of this initiative that allows one to give to Quebec Life Coalition without it costing one a cent (see included flyer), you are demonstrating to the faithful that we advance the Kingdom of Heaven by all our actions, and not only those actions undertaken during the time we are at church.
   3. Spaghetti dinner / Corn Roast / Benefit Concert / Pancake breakfast, …all these are great ways to address difficult life issues in a warm, friendly setting.
   4. A special collection: Once or twice a year (say, on the Sunday nearest to the 25th of March—9 months before Christmas) and on Father’s Day, a special collection can be undertaken to support Quebec Life Coalition and / or other local pro-life organizations.

As summer rolls on, the counter marking the number of abortions in Quebec rolls on too. The grim toll, at the time of writing, is probably around 17,500 abortions so far this year. That’s about 50 abortions a day in Montreal alone.

This disconnect between what seems like a pleasant, sunny summer season and, on the other hand, the ongoing silent massacre of unborn children, reminds me of a book I read by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist who was imprisoned in a Communist Russian prison camp and lived to tell the tale. Of the many books he wrote about his experiences in these slave labour camps or “gulags”, The Gulag Archipelago was probably his most celebrated work. The testimony and careful documentation it contained, because it so embarrassed the academic and other cultural elites of the West who, well into the 1970s and 80s, still had romantic visions about Communism and the Russian revolution, helped convince the world that Communism was an evil ideology that had to be vigilantly resisted.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote about how there existed in the Soviet Union a complex network of prisons and camps, some in remote Siberia, others built adjacent to the most pleasant-looking parks in the downtowns of the most domesticated cities. The only people who knew about the prisons—or dared speak about them—were those prisoners and employees on the inside. The prisons work camps– the gulags— were so numerous that Solzhenitsyn likened them to little islands dotting the length and breadth of Russia—a gulag archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn spoke about how, when he was imprisoned, he would look outside through the bars and reinforced glass to the street below, and see people walking outside in the sun, going about their business as if nothing were occurring only 20, 30 meters away. At that time, ordinary Russians knew about the camps—they knew that people where being whisked away during the night to destinations unknown—but they kept quiet, repressed their thoughts and merely went on about their daily business.

Today, something very similar is going on. While people are traipsing down the street in the sunlight with their I-pod buds in their ears and an ice-latte in their hands, a mere 30-40 meters away, behind the sterile glass doors of an anonymous-looking building, an unborn child is being pulled apart, limb from limb, or being suctioned and rendered into paste, while his mother looks on in resignation, and in the next room a “nurse”, pulling down her surgical mask, counts the extracted body parts to make sure that none have been left behind to fester in the mother’s womb.

And just as the prison camps in Solzhenitsyn’s day dotted the land, so do today’s abortion facilities. In the picture on the right you can see a map of the city of Montreal dotted with its “archipelago” of 21 abortion facilities.

At the sight of this evil, we might be tempted to two things: despair on the one hand, or scapegoating on the other. Despair, because we rightly wonder how we could hope to overcome such evil when it is so widely accepted, even championed, by so many of our contemporaries. Or scapegoating, because we may hope that by eliminating an especially potent symbol of evil –abortion—we might be erasing Evil itself.

Both reactions are wrong. Scapegoating is wrong because, as Solzhenitsyn himself wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” In other words, if we see evil “out there”, it’s because there is evil “in here”—in us. Which is why despair is not the answer either, because we have the means of transforming ourselves. To demonstrate, I’ve overlaid the map of the abortion facilities in Quebec with that of the churches in Quebec (the churches are represented by the smaller circles).

So what are we waiting for? Let’s wake up to our stark reality, but with a sense of hope that we have the means of bringing light into the prisons of the world.

P.S. Here below is a live GoogleMaps version of the jpegs above. Please bear the message above in mind --the full message-- as you look over Quebec's modern day Gulag Archipelago.